Ongoing

• Real-time non-invasive estimation of vital body parameters (viz. core body temperature, blood-oxygen level, respiration rate, heart rate) from RGB videos to classify individuals as healthy or non-healthy (DST - RAKSHAK scheme - with Dr. Debarati Bhunia Chakraborty, Prof. Richa Singh, Prof. Mayank Vatsa)

• Design of a computational, embodied, social machine-mind architecture to function in the real world – Need to probe into atomic processes of cognition across species; some questions of interest - translation of inputs into internal bespoke representations, basis of theory of mind and consciousness, self-evolving algorithms and structures to support robust adaptation, processes of introspection and generalization, encoding of commonsense and other elements of procedural knowledge, imagination in the mundane and creative spaces, extraction and preservation of fingerprints of mutisensory perceptions, non von Neumann architectures for the foundational structure of embodied systems.

Completed

• A study on Lotfi Zadeh’s ‘Z-numbers’ and its application in the emulation of natural language understanding in cognitive systems – Analysis of the pros and practical challenges of the Z-numbers; defined perception-operators that utilize Z-number equivalents of natural language sentences to generate instances of comprehension.

• Context-identification and quantification of the importance of natural language sentences in a given text sample – Defined a technique, inspired by Bayesian dynamics and Shannon's entropy, to predict the context of a text sample and measure the importance of sentences to facilitate pruning of irrelevant text-processing cycles.

• Definition of the Z*-number paradigm to capture deep meaning of natural language expressions - The Z*-numbers are augmented Z-numbers that take into consideration the importance of the context, and memories and affects aroused in response to natural language expressions; envisioned as perceptual symbols of text, speech and active thoughts (~mentalese).

• Design of a blueprint of an embodied, social cognitive system – Enumeration of macro-functional modules of the architecture of a sentient, conscious, social cognitive system; an attempt towards the design of a "thinking machine"; draws inspiration from Marvin Minsky’s ‘Society of Mind’ and 'Emotion Machine' philosophies and references human-brain processes of contemplation and comprehension of dynamic real world events; aiming for man-machine and machine-machine symbiosis.

• Enumeration of essential parameters for the emulation and representation of the machine-self – Identification of factors that annotate machine-knowledge with ‘subjective’ real-world information representation, and subsequent processing; supports expression of the system's sense of self and emulation of theory of mind.

• Design of afferent, efferent, and intra-system multimodal data-structure schematics for embodied cognitive systems - Encapsulates multisensory afferent inputs (sourced from the external world or memories) and system-visceral responses thereof; facilitates multimodal inter-modular exchanges in the framework; transports sensorimotor response-instruction microcodes from the central processing modules to the peripheral units of the framework; schematics are flexible across data type and support variable information representation.

• Formalization of an approximate procedure of contemplation and comprehension of the ever-changing real world - Macro-steps of intuitive, reflective, deliberative and self-conscious contemplation during comprehension of multimodal, dynamic real world events; uses the Z*-numbers as operands, multisensory data-structures to support system-operations, and objective and subjective parameters of cognition; dynamic attention arbitration across stimuli of consequence modelled as well.