Alexei Samsonovich

• George Mason University

This chapter comprises selected short and extended abstracts of invited talks and discussion panels that took place at the 2023 Annual International Conference on Brain-Inspired Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Intelligence, also known as the 14th Annual Meeting of the BICA Society (BICA*AI 2023), held in Ningbo, China during October 13–15, 2...

This chapter comprises selected short and extended abstracts of presentations given at the 2023 Annual International Conference on Brain-Inspired Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Intelligence, also known as the 14th Annual Meeting of the BICA Society (BICA*AI 2023), held in Ningbo, China during October 13–15, 2023. Only those abstracts are in...

There are a lot of studies researching automated recognition of emotions. Emotions are represented as points in an emotion space. The emotion space itself is represented by different types of models. One is Facial Action Units System, another is Valence-Arousal-Dominance model. This study aims to create a mapping between these two emotion spaces. T...

The goal of this study is two-fold: (1) to evaluate the usefulness and reliability of ChatGPT as a tool for detecting and generating nontrivial semantic categories of text, characterized by various conversational intentionalities, and (2) to build a semantic map of intentionalities and characterize its topological and geometric properties. ChatGPT...

Large Language Models (LLM) enable recognition of the topic of arbitrary statements, as well as their emotional coloring, but do not “understand” the logic of emotions, despite the fact that they can often generate adequate responses in a given context. On the other hand, cognitive architectures such as eBICA are able to model the dynamics of emoti...

A virtual conversational agent is designed based on a cognitive model integrated with neural network model named BERT and large language model ChatGPT. The system was tested in a Turing-test-like experiment with human participants, using a limited paradigm of registration of a guest in a hotel. Performance of the agent on several scales matches hum...

The work addresses the problem of integration of deep learning and genetic algorithms (GA). An approach is developed where the GA directly modifies the training datasets rather than adjusting the parameters of the trained neural network. These datasets consist of records capturing the agent's behavior in the environment and are treated as genotypes...

Human face is used to express affects and feelings, either involuntary or deliberately. How many dimensions of emotional flavors can be robustly distinguished in facial expressions, across individuals and cultures? Here we offer an answer and develop a practical approach to generate synthetic emotional facial expressions. Results can be used in stu...

Embodied social agents are expected to become useful for emotion regulation with applications in the field of service-oriented artificial intelligence. Emotion models can be used to generate an adequate response of the agent in order to achieve a desired emotion regulation effect. Here an eBICA-based model of emotional interaction of embodied socia...

Virtual embodied social agents are expected to become socially acceptable and useful for emotion regulation with applications in the field of service-oriented artificial intelligence. In this study an eBICA-based model of emotional interaction is used to control behavior of a virtual hotel receptionist: the Registrar, implemented in a virtual envir...

Applications of socially emotional artificial intelligence are demanded in many practical areas, including psychological counselling and psychotherapy. A person who is potentially in trouble and needs help has to overcome an internal barrier before deciding to see a psychiatrist. On the other hand, obtaining an anonymous online consultation or taki...

Deep learning (DL) technologies automate the labor of theoreticians, developers, and programmers, that is otherwise needed to design knowledge representations and algorithms for each particular domain. At the same time, DL has limitations rooted in the statistical nature of the method, which largely ignores the available domain knowledge. An exampl...

Many digital devices and systems that interact with humans can be expected to become emotional in the coming years. This transition will help them achieve trust and mutual understanding in establishing contacts at the social level, which is necessary for their integration into human society. The main problem is the ability to understand emotions an...

A cognitive model of the virtual clownery paradigm is developed, in which two clowns perform on a virtual stage, interacting with each other. Agents controlling virtual clown behavior were designed and implemented based on the eBICA cognitive architecture and embedded into the virtual environment, where they controlled two avatars. Clownery action...

This work examines one possibility of using a deep neural network to control a virtual dance partner behavior. A neural-network-based system is designed and used for classification, evaluation, prediction, and generation of socially emotional behavior of a virtual actor. The network is trained using deep learning on the data generated with an algor...

The framework of emotional Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (eBICA) is used to define a cognitive model, producing believable socially emotional behavior in a social interaction paradigm in a virtual environment. The paradigm selected for this study is a virtual pet interacting with a human. Empirical results indicate that the combinati...

This work presents a new paradigm for empirical study of cognitive models of emotional intelligence and preliminary results obtained within it. Among computational approaches to modeling human emotions, the eBICA cognitive architecture takes a special place, because it provides a framework for unification of cognitive and physiological models of em...

Many approaches were proposed to model socially emotional behavior in virtual actors, such as intelligent tutors, creative assistants or team partners. They still lack the ‘magic’ of human-level cognition and emotionality: systems built for one paradigm appear uncanny outside of its boundary. Natural cognitive systems, on the other hand, can adapt...

A cognitive model, producing believable socially emotional behavior, is used to control the Virtual Actor behavior in an online scientific conference paradigm. For this purpose, a videogame-like platform is developed, in which Virtual Actors are embedded as poster presenters, receptionists, etc. The expectation is that the combination of somatic fa...

There is a question about the appropriate emotional and expressive language of a virtual actor. In this paper we study facial expressions. We investigate the transformations between the space of Action Units and the standard affective space in the loop of nonverbal communication between a person and a virtual actor using facial expressions [1]. We...

Social virtual actors need to interact with users emotionally, convincing them in their ability to understand human minds. For this to happen, an artificial emotional intelligence is needed, capable of believable behavior in real-life situations. Summarizing recent work of the authors, the present paper extends the general state-of-the-art framewor...

The videogame platform Teleport created earlier allows us to study anonymous social interactions among actors of various nature: human and virtual actor, ensuring their indistinguishability, which implies believable behavior of a virtual actor. The present study found a connection between the human player behavior in the Teleport game and her psych...

This work is devoted to the development of a concept-proof prototype of a special kind of a virtual actor - an intelligent assistant and a partner, called here “Virtual Listener” (VL). The main role of VL is to establish and maintain a socially-emotional contact with the participant, thereby providing a feedback to the human performance, using mini...

The article presents a new approach to building semantic maps based on the use of the eBICA model and the calculation of neurophysiological correlates of behavioral motives based on fMRI data. In this study, a social videogame paradigm was used in combination with fMRI and other recording tools. The obtained data show the complex neural network dyn...

Virtual Listener (VL) is a generalized prototype of a virtual character based on the principles of cognitive architecture eBICA, which uses facial expressions and “body language” (eyes movements, head rotation) to keep social and emotional contact with the user. Such contact also implies that VL needs to perceive user’s facial expression and gaze,...

Videogame paradigms enter a social level of interaction between a human player and a virtual character (NPC). In this context, it is important to evaluate the believability and perceived emotionality of such NPC in a paradigm that elicits emotionally biased behavior in human players. For this purpose, we conducted a study using a dungeon adventure...

The topic addressed here is the role of emotions in music creation. The fact that musical fragments can be evaluated on a number of emotional scales allows one to create a semantic map of fragments and to use this map as a guidance in music creation. The work presents results of the study of a virtual composer assistant based on the semantic map an...

The objective of this work was to study the dynamics of human emotional states in the process of social interaction in a virtual environment. The previously developed for this purpose prototypes of the virtual actor (NPC) and its virtual environment simulator “Teleport” underwent significant re-design and modification. The experimental platform was...

Intelligent agents and co-robots, or cobots, become increasingly popular today as creators of digital art, including robotic or virtual dancing. Arguably, the creativity of such tools is linked to their social-emotional intelligence. In this work we question this hypothesis, extending the general paradigm of an emotionally-intelligent creative assi...

Human-friendly virtual and physical collaborative robots, or cobots, will work side-by-side with users as helping minds and hands in a variety of creative cognitive tasks, including design, invention, creation of art, or goal setting in unexpected situations in unpredictable environments. These tasks require autonomous reasoning and engage social-e...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an effective non-invasive tool for exploration and analysis of brain functions. Here functional neural networks involved in behavioral motivations are studied using fMRI. It was found that behavioral conditions producing different motivations for action can be associated with different patterns of fun...

This paper is devoted to the problem of understanding mechanisms underlying behavioral correlates of head direction (HD) cells in the mammalian retrosplenial cortex. HD cells become active when an animal, such as rat, is facing a particular direction in its environment. The robustness of this phenomenon is usually attributed to attractor dynamics o...

An artifact needs to possess a human-level social-emotional intelligence in order to be accepted as a team member and to be productive in the team. A general theoretical model describing this kind of artificial intelligence is currently missing. This work makes one step toward its development, using a simplistic virtual environment paradigm and an...

Cognitive psychology has accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about human social emotions, emotional appraisals and their usage in decision making. Can an emotional cognitive architecture injected into an artifact make it more “humane”, and therefore, more productive in a variety of creative collaboration paradigms? Here, we argue that the answer...

Intelligent agents and co-robots, or cobots, become increasingly popular today as assistants of creators of arts. They can be also expected to become popular in the near future as assistants in other creative work, including research and, in particular, insight problem solving. Arguably, the success of such tools is linked to their social-emotional...

The future of artificial intelligence (AI) depends on whether intelligent agents become human-like in their cognitive capabilities, giving rise to creative Cobots and social Actors that will inherit human values and get accepted by the society as equal minds. This expected transition requires the development of several key capabilities in AI, inclu...

The topic addressed here is the role of emotions in music creation. This work presents research that is expected to become a precursor for the development of a software that will have the capacity to generate musical compositions at a human aesthetic level, and will serve as an intelligent creative assistant to a composer. The goal in this study is...

A weak semantic map, as opposed to a strong semantic map, allows for a choice of coordinates that are characterized by definite semantics: e.g., valence, arousal, dominance. Weak semantic maps of words can be built from synonym-antonym dictionaries, by pulling synonyms together and antonyms apart. Polysemy is one of the problems with this approach....

This article describes a model of the future software system, the main task of which is to provide assistance in coloring graphical user interfaces (GUI). The functioning of the system is based on semantic map data. Elements of this semantic map are individual colors and combinations of colors, associated with functional elements of the interface....

The test for general human-level intelligence proposed by Alan Turing at the dawn of computers remains to be the best-known ultimate challenge for Artificial Intelligence today, if understood more generally than the originally proposed paradigm, despite all its controversies and weaknesses. Yet, a better-posed challenge is needed in the era of new...

In the current study the concept of an insight problem solving Assistant is developed. Assistant will be able to help students in solving problems by offering general strategies while taking into account student’s emotional and cognitive state, evaluated based on behavior and self-report. At the core of the assistant is a semantic map, that assigns...

This work continues the effort to design and test the cognitive architecture eBICA: a general model of emotionally biased behavior control and decision making, with the focus on social emotional relationships. The key building blocks of the model include dynamics of mutual appraisals of actors, bi-directionally linked to behavior, on the one hand,...

Semantic mapping is typically used to find deep connections between different words or text documents. The purpose of this study is to extend the semantic mapping method to images. For this purpose, the publicly available affective image database was used. Five methods of semantic map construction were compared, including the methods based on (a) h...

Emotions play an important role in human cognition and therefore need to be present in the Common Model of Cognition. In this paper, the emotion working group focuses on functional aspects of emotions and describes what we believe are the points of interactions with the Common Model of Cognition. The present paper should not be viewed as a consensu...

This book includes papers from the second year of the prestigious First International Early Research Career Enhancement School (FIERCES) series: a successful, new format that puts a school in direct connection with a conference and a social program, all dedicated to young scientists. Reflecting the friendly, social atmosphere of excitement and oppo...

An autonomous actor should decide on its own which goals and strategies to pursue in a new situation involving multiple actors. Humans in such cases typically rely on social factors, such as individual relationships and ethical background. An artificial autonomous agent in such cases can be more useful and efficient as an actor in a human team, if...

Weak semantic maps are characterized by definite semantics associated with their dimensions, while the notion of a dissimilarity metric may not be applicable to them. Among the variety of approaches to their construction, weak semantic maps can be derived from semantic relations, such as synonymy and antonymy, using the technique developed by Samso...

The disconnect between scientific schools of thought across the world is most notable in cognitive, neural, and computer sciences. The intersection of these fields is exactly where a powerful new approach has emerged recently, known as Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA). Here we describe a new initiative: to build an open informat...

This book presents cutting-edge research focused on current challenges towards the realization of Biologically Inspired intelligent agents, or Cognitive Architectures (BICA). The chapters are written by both world-recognized experts (including Antonio Chella, Olivier Georgeon, Oliver Kutz, Antonio Lieto, David Vernon, Paul Verschure, and others) an...

The many approaches to semantic mapping developed recently demand a precise measuring device that would, on the one hand, be sensitive to human subjective experiences (and therefore must involve a human in the loop), and on the other hand, allow comparative study and validation of consistency of individual semantic maps. The idea explored in this w...

The aim of this study was to examine the role of a software tool in diagnosing student's thinking during problem solving in mathematics with 41 college students. Students were asked to select relevant steps, facts and strategies represented on the screen and connect them by arrows, indicating their plan of solution. Only after the diagram was compl...

The aim of this study is to develop an approach to evaluation of a biologically inspired, causal model of cognition that exposes the mechanistic requirements for achieving fluid intelligence and makes testable predictions of neurophysiological measures. In order to build human-level-efficient tools for data analysis, it is necessary to have a theor...

The emergence of biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA) challenges researchers across many disciplines with a new frontier: computational replication of the human mind, taken in all its essential aspects, as a functional unit of a team or a society. The mission of the international conference series on BICA is to facilitate interactio...

A key to semantic analysis is a precise and practically useful definition of meaning that is general for all domains of knowledge. We previously introduced the notion of weak semantic map: a metric space allocating concepts along their most general (universal) semantic characteristics while at the same time ignoring other, domain-specific aspects o...

A key capability that distinguishes humans from intelligent agents is the ability to generate and select new goals in an unexpected situation, while re-prioritizing existing goals. This level of cognitive autonomy becomes practically vital for actors working as team members with humans or in unpredictable environments. The work is focused on a new...

Human-like artificial emotional intelligence is vital for integration of future robots into the human society. This work introduces a general framework for representation and processing of emotional contents in a cognitive architecture, called “emotional biologically inspired cognitive architecture” (eBICA). Unlike in previous attempts, in this fra...

We present a new building block for cognitive machines: a model called NeuroNavigator, inspired by theories of the hippocampus. The model is designed to fit both biological plausibility and constraints of new-generation neuromorphic hardware. Its functions may range from spatial navigation to episodic memory retrieval. The goal of the present study...

The emergent consensus on dimensional models of sentiment, appraisal, emotions, and values is on the semantics of the principal dimensions, typically interpreted as valence, arousal, and dominance. The notion of weak semantic maps was introduced recently as distribution of representations in abstract spaces that are not derived from human judgments...

Achieving human-level social and emotional intelligence is vital for the integration of future virtual agents and robots into the human society. To solve the challenge, it is necessary to have efficient metrics and criteria that would allow us to measure how close the solution is to the state of the art. In this work, one such potentially useful me...

New powerful approach in cognitive modeling and intelligent agent design, known as biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA), allows us to create in the near future general-purpose, real-life computational equivalents of the human mind, that can be used for a broad variety of practical applications. As a first step toward this goal, stat...

The BICA Challenge is the challenge to create a general-purpose, real-life computational equivalent of the human mind using an approach based on biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA). To solve it, we need to understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive, metacognitive and learning functio...

GMU-BICA, the biologically-inspired self-aware cognitive architecture developed at George Mason University, continues to be a useful prototype for various intelligent artifacts, including intelligent tutoring systems, yet the underlying formalism of mental states used in its design was never described in detail. The present theoretical work aims at...

We present the broad outlines of a roadmap toward human-level artificial general intelligence (henceforth, AGI). We begin by discussing AGI in general, adopting a pragmatic goal for its attainment and a necessary foundation of characteristics and requirements. An initial capability landscape will be presented, drawing on major themes from developme...

Emotional intelligence is the key for acceptance of intelligent agents by humans as equal partners, e.g., in ad hoc teams. At the same time, its existing implementations in intelligent agents are mostly limited to basic affects. Currently, there is no consensus in the understanding of complex and social emotions at the level of functional and compu...

Artificial emotional intelligence is vital for integration of future robots into the human society. This work introduces one possible approach to representation and processing of emotional mental states and attitudes (appraisals) in a cognitive architecture. The developed framework will allow for implementation of emotional intelligence in artifact...

Web personalization involves automated content analysis of text, and modern technologies of semantic analysis of text rely on a number of scales. Among them is the abstractness of meaning, which is not captured by more traditional measures of sentiment, such as valence, arousal and dominance. The present work introduces a physics-inspired approach...

Despite recent impressive progress in automated planning and navigation tools, artifacts still lack robustness and flexibility of biological systems. In order to mimic biology, it is necessary to use principles of dynamics and architecture found in the brain. Here we translate our biologically inspired model of spatial learning and navigation (Sams...

A new challenge is proposed for future intelligent artifacts based on biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA), called the BICA Challenge. Namely, it is proposed that a BICA agent can only be considered human-level intelligent if it can be accepted and trusted as an equal member (a "person") by a human community. For example, an agent o...

This short work is a follow-up on the review of the online Comparative Table of Cognitive Architectures, published in the BICA 2010 Proceedings. While the original review listed architectures and their features in one uniform format, the primary goal here is to go through feature-by-feature comparison across architectures and to see what features a...

This chapter provides a brief overview of the volume of BICA 2011 Proceedings, viewed in the broader context of recent emergent developments in the field of BICA. The present conference is the fourth event in the BICA conference series, and the Second Annual Meeting of the BICA Society. In addition to being a guide to the book, this chapter provide...

Recent years have seen a gradual convergence of seemingly distant research fields over a single goal: understanding and replicating biological intelligence in artifacts. This work presents a general overview on the origin, the state-of-the-art, scientific challenges and the future of Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (BICA) research. Our...

[This corrects the article on p. e10921 in vol. 5.].

Metric systems for semantics, or semantic cognitive maps, are allocations of words or other representations in a metric space based on their meaning. Existing methods for semantic mapping, such as Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, are based on paradigms involving dissimilarity metrics. They typically do not take into account...

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2009 Fall Symposium Series, held Thursday through Saturday, November 5–7, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The Symposium Series was preceded on Wednesday, November 4 by a one-day AI funding seminar. The titles of the seven symposia were...

We present a universal building block for cognitive machines, called NeuroNavigator, inspired by theories of the hippocampus. The module is designed to fit both biological plausibility and constraints of forthcoming neuromorphic hardware. Its functions may range from spatial navigation to episodic memory retrieval. The goal of the present study of...

GMU BICA is a biologically inspired cognitive architecture developed at George Mason University. Its main distinguishing feature is a system of data structures called “mental states” that enables various forms of metacognition. The present study develops an understanding of the role of metacognition during working scenario generation (a general ele...

This work is a review of the online Comparative Table of Cognitive Architectures (the version that was available at http://bicasymposium.com/cogarch on September 20, 2010). This continuously updated online resource is a collective product of many researchers and developers of cognitive architectures. Names of its contributors (sorted alphabetically...

Designing an agent that can grow cognitively from a child to an adult human level of intelligence is the key challenge on the roadmap to human-level artificial intelligence. To solve this challenge, it is important to understand general characteristics of the expected learning process at a level of mathematical models. The present work makes a step...

In order to understand the role of metacognition and self-regulation in student learning, 35 college students were asked to solve problems in college linear algebra and in remedial math using Cognitive Constructor. Results reveal the predominance of forward chaining in problem solving. Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial...

Many approaches were explored in recent years to introduce principles of metacognition and meta-learning into cognitive architectures, yet none of them resulted in a scalable human-like learner. This work presents an approach intended to fill the gap between human self-regulated learners and artificial learners by introducing a new spin of the fami...

The notion of a universal semantic cognitive map is introduced as a general indexing space for semantics, useful to reduce semantic relations to geometric and topological relations. As a first step in designing the concept, the notion of semantics is operationalized in terms of human subjective experience and is related to the concept of spatial po...

This Chapter summarizes ideas presented at the special PerMIS 2008 session on Biological Inspiration for Intelligent Systems. Bio-inspired principles of development and evolution are a special part of the bio-models and principles that can be used to improve intelligent systems and related artifacts. Such principles are not always explicit. They re...

The challenge of creating AGI is better understood in the context of recent studies of biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA). While the solution is still far away, promising ideas can be derived from biological inspirations. The notions of a chain reaction, its critical mass and scaling laws prove to be helpful in understanding the c...

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2008 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, November 7-9, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts, (2) AI in Eldercare: New Solutions to Old Problems, (3...