Paradigms and models of embodied intelligence

The first part of the talk is about the paradigm of embodied cognition intelligence. Starting from the main paradigms of cognition, a unified paradigm of cognition will be proposed using insights from Jean Piaget, Charles Sanders Pierce and Francisco Varela. This unified paradigm of cognition fits the notion of Embodied Intelligence very well. In particular, the criterium of success for all kinds of embodied intelligence is viability. Then, important qualitative known facts about the neural network and its relation to the body will be used for proposing different paradigmatic levels of embodied intelligence.

The second part of the talk is thus proposing three mathematical models of embodied intelligence, the reactive, the emotional and the predictive embodied agent. The first mathematical model is about a pure reactive embodied agent constrained to remain in its viability domain under perturbations of the environment: it can be modelled as a random dynamical system in a constrained domain. The second mathematical model is enlarging the previous one with an emotional embodied agent able to use reinforcement learning for selecting its strategies without any model of its own sensorimotor dynamics: it can be modelled as an aged random dynamical inclusion in a viability tube, in the sense of viability theory. The third mathematical model is still enlarging the previous one with a predictive embodied agent able to construct models of its own sensorimotor dynamics with its uncertainties and dealing with the compromise exploration/exploitation for inventing new strategies in difficult and noisy environment.

The conclusion is summarizing these three levels of embodied intelligence, reactive, emotional and predictive. It is furthermore looking at the link between embodied intelligence and collective intelligence for these three levels.

Paradigm of Embodied Intelligence

• Cheryl J. Misak, editor. The Cambridge companion to Peirce. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 2004.
• Jean Piaget. Genetic epistemology. Norton, New York, 1971.
• Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

Models of Embodied Intelligence

• Teuvo Kohonen and Timo Honkela. Kohonen network. Scholarpedia journal, 2(1):1568, 2007.
• Christopher John Cornish Hellaby Watkins. Learning from delayed rewards. Dissertation, King's College, 1989.
• Shun'ichi Amari and Hiroshi Nagaoka. Methods of information geometry, volume 191 of Translations of mathematical monographs. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2000.
• Jean-Pierre Aubin: Viability theory. Systems & control: foundations & applications. Birkhäuser, Boston, 1991.
• Boris Hasselblatt, editor. Handbook of dynamical systems, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2002.