Cognitive Science Seminar (COMP/PSYC/PHIL 7514/8514)

Spring 2023

Instructor: Bonny Banerjee, Ph.D.

Contact Information:

Office: 208B Engineering Science Bldg

Phone: 901-678-4498

E-mail: BBnerjee@memphis.edu

Office Hours: By appointment

When: Wednesdays 2:20-5:20pm

There will be a regular lecture during 2:20-4:00 pm and a talk by an invited speaker on a topic relevant to the course during 4:00-5:20 pm. Everyone, including faculty, is welcome to attend the talks.

Where: FIT Bldg. Room 405

Course Description:

"Agents: Why should they act?"

In the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), anything that can perceive its environment and act on that environment is called an agent (Russell & Norvig, 2020). In this view, humans, most living organisms, autonomous vehicles, and thermostats are agents. A key question to understand for the design of agent models is -- why do living organisms act? In AI, there are two leading theories that strive to answer this question: (1) to maximize expected reward (a.k.a. reinforcement learning), which is the dominant view in AI, and (2) to minimize the brain's prediction error (a.k.a. predictive coding or free energy principle). A number of other theories have been extensively researched in the natural and applied sciences. In this Cognitive Science Seminar course, we will discuss papers and invite speakers from AI, robotics, psychology, neuroscience, biology, and philosophy to understand the influential theories spanning over a century of research regarding why living organisms act.

Required Text:

Readings from research papers and book chapters.

Evaluation and Final Grades:

This course requires high level of creative thinking from each student. Grading will include project and report (80%), and class participation (20%). Students will be given a project topic which will not involve computer programming and will be carried out throughout the semester.

External Speakers: To be announced by email.