AGISI

The AGI Sentinel Initiative (2017-2020)

Publications, talks and more


Research papers, expert articles, talks


Monett, D. (2022). Artificial Intelligence: The promise, the myth, and the challenges ahead. Closing keynote at the SLAS Europe 2022 Conference, Dublin, Ireland, May 27, 2022.
"AI has left the academic research lab once again. As a field, it is living a new spring mainly due to its recent machine learning applications, now also part of the technological advances we all use and are affected by every day. Yet, the AI promise to solve the future is both hitting the immaturity of its present and repeating several mistakes from the past. Myths about AI superpowers are ballooned above its actual capabilities, thereby obscuring the tremendous impact AI could have on the way technology is being perceived, developed, and used. Surrendering to machines is not the solution to society’s most crucial problems. It depends on us, humans, how we deal with AI and its implications when shaping the society we want to live in."

Monett, D. (2021). Coming to terms with intelligence in machines. Keynote at the Agile Testing Days Conference, Potsdam, Brandenburg, November 15 - 18, 2021.

Monett, D., Hoge, L., Haase, L., Schwarz, L., Normann, M., and Scheibe, L. (2021). The Intelligence Corpus, an Annotated Corpus of Definitions of Intelligence: Annotation, Guidelines, and Student Research Projects. In L. Gómez Chova, A. López Martínez, & I. Candel Torres (eds.), Proceedings of the 14th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, ICERI 2021 (an online conference), pp. 3626-3634, IATED Academy, November 8 - 9, 2021, (ISBN: 978-84-09-34549-6, ISSN: 2340-1095).
"Delineating the boundaries of the discourse on intelligence may help in defining and understanding its most discussed concept [...] Furthermore, better insights into definitions and how to define them has proven to be essential for a better understanding of concepts, intelligence and AI included [...]. Knowing those concepts and related cognitive abilities [...] is expected for AI researchers and practitioners in the first place. Yet, they are also central to extending or at least providing the basics of AI literacy to other stakeholders of our society. It is the main goal of this paper to present how a few hundreds of definitions of intelligence (of both human intelligence and machine intelligence) were annotated by taking into account different properties of good definitions."

Monett, D. (2021). Intelligence, the elusive concept and general capability still not found in machines. Keynote at the 22nd European Conference on Knowledge Management, ECKM 2021, Coventry, UK, September 2 - 3, 2021, online event.

Monett, D. (2021). Panel Discussion What a dumb question - Is AI actually Intelligent?. Machine Learning in Healthcare Meetup, meetup.ai, Berlin, June 16, 2021, online event.

Monett, D. (2021). The I in AI (or why there is still none). Webinar El Futuro Digital de las Infraestructuras y la Sociedad (engl. The Digital Future of Infrastructures and Society), Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, Juni 9, 2021, online event.

Monett, D., Lampe, N., Ehrlicher-Schmidt, M., and Bewer, N. (2020). Intelligence Catalog-guided Tracking of the Evolution of (machine) Intelligence: Preliminary results. In Basile, P., Basile, V., Cabrio, E., & Croce, D. (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language for Artificial Intelligence, NL4AI 2020, 2735: 118-129, CEUR-WS, co-located with the 19th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AIxIA 2020, November 25th-27th, 2020, online event (ISSN: 1613-0073).
"The idea is to investigate the use of capabilities that denote intelligence in the AI scientific discourse with the goal to track the evolution of the narrative around intelligence and its manifestations in humans and machines over time. Intelligence capabilities and related properties that are used when defining intelligence were extracted from previous work in this area in the form of a catalog and spanning over different fields, AI included. Although still an elusive, difficult to define concept, analyzing and understanding the discourse around intelligence may shape both the way we use it and how intelligent artifacts are and will continue to be developed in the future."

Monett, D. and C. W. P. Lewis (2020a). Definitional Foundations for Intelligent Systems, Part I: Quality Criteria for Definitions of Intelligence. In J. Vopava, V. Douda, R. Kratochvil, and M. Konecki (eds.), Proceedings of The 10th Anniversary Conference of the Academic Conference Association, AC 2020, pp. 73-80, MAC Prague Consulting Ltd., August 7th, 2020, Prague, Czech Republic (ISBN: 978-80-88085-30-0).
"We posit that the lack of consensus definitions of (machine or artificial) intelligence might be affected by the lack of knowledge of conceptual analysis and other well-investigated theories. Acute contextualization of the concepts that are defined may also be an issue. Accordingly, in this two-part paper, we review some basic concepts from across research fields on how to explicate a definition. In Part I we propose 30 quality criteria for definitions that shall serve as guidelines for well-defined definitions of any concept. The quality criteria may allow for both better insights into definitions and a wider understanding of the current discourse on AI. In Part II we provide basic terminology on definitions and an iterative process to guide the construction of robust definitions by considering the quality criteria introduced in Part I. Our central goal is twofold: we want to facilitate understanding across fields and inform different stakeholders from industry, academia, legal and governments, among others, by contributing to the formal foundations on elucidating 'good and robust definitions' for AI."

Monett, D. and C. W. P. Lewis (2020b). Definitional Foundations for Intelligent Systems, Part II: Constructing a Definition and Examples. In J. Vopava, V. Douda, R. Kratochvil, and M. Konecki (eds.), Proceedings of The 10th Anniversary Conference of the Academic Conference Association, AC 2020, pp. 81-89, MAC Prague Consulting Ltd., August 7th, 2020, Prague, Czech Republic (ISBN: 978-80-88085-30-0).

Monett, D., Lewis, C. W. P., and Thórisson, K. R. (2020). Introduction to the JAGI Special Issue "On Defining Artificial Intelligence"–Commentaries and Author's Response. In D. Monett, C. W. P. Lewis, and K. R. Thórisson (eds.), Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, 11(2), pp. 1-4 (ISSN: 1946-0163, DOI:10.2478/jagi-2020-0003).
"We are convinced that a variety of opinions on defining AI, especially as seen through the spectacles of a group of leading AI authorities, will be remarkably influential both for the field and for defining machine intelligence. We trust that this special issue of the JAGI will become a transcending referent on defining AI and that, in Pei Wang’s words (Wang, 2020), it will constitute the beginning, not the ending, of that discussion."

Monett, D., Lewis, C. W. P., and Thórisson, K. R. (eds.) (2020). Special Issue "On Defining Artificial Intelligence"–Commentaries and Author's Response. Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, 11(2), pp. 1-99 (ISSN: 1946-0163, DOI:10.2478/jagi-2020-0003).

Monett, D. (2019). Tracking the Evolution of (Machine) Intelligence. Keynote at the AImpact Summit 2019, Munich, 27 - 28 November, 2019.

Monett, D. and Winkler, Ch. (2019). Using AI to Understand Intelligence: The Search for a Catalog of Intelligence Capabilities. In M. Alam, V. Basile, F. Dell'Orletta, M. Nissim, and N. Novielli (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language for Artificial Intelligence, NL4AI 2019, Vol. 2521, pp. 1-15, CEUR-WS, co-located with the 18th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AIIA 2019, 19 - 22 November, 2019, Rende, Italy (ISSN: 1613-0073).
"The two-fold purpose of this paper is [...] to use AI to understand intelligence and to help to frame a common language around defining it. To reach these goals, we apply various AI techniques to extract the most representative verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adjective-noun phrases contained in experts' opinions that might indicate cognitive and behavioral abilities (or capabilities) that could be used when defining intelligence."

Monett, D. (2019). The boundaries of the (machine) intelligence discourse. Keynote at the Symposium Mensch-Computer-Interaktion: KI für den Menschen (engl.: Symposium Human-Computer-Interaction: AI for the people), German Informatics Society, Berlin, 12 November, 2019.

Monett, D., Lewis, C. W. P., and Thórisson, K. R. (eds.) (2019). "On Defining Artificial Intelligence". Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, 10(2), pp. 1-37 (ISSN: 1946-0163, DOI:10.2478/jagi-2019-0002).

Monett, D., Hoge, L., and Lewis, C. W. P. (2019). Cognitive Biases Undermine Consensus on Definitions of Intelligence and Limit Understanding. In U. Furbach, S. Hölldobler, M. Ragni, R. Rzepka, C. Schon, J. Vallverdu, and A. Wlodarczyk (eds.), Joint Proceedings of the Workshops on Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches to Dialog Agents (LaCATODA 2019) and on Bridging the Gap Between Human and Automated Reasoning (BtG 2019), Vol. 2452, pp. 52-59, CEUR-WS, co-located with the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2019, 10 - 16 August, 2019, Macao, China (ISSN: 1613-0073).
"In this paper, we show how different cognitive biases can undermine consensus on defining intelligence, and thus how an understanding of intelligence can be substantially affected by these human traits. We also provide general recommendations for tackling these problems. An understanding of intelligence can be achieved by understanding the limits of both human expressiveness and the current discourse around definitions of intelligence within and across the concerned fields."

Monett, D. (2019). Overcoming fundamental problems of (machine) intelligence research. Keynote at the Rise of AI Conference, Berlin, 16 May, 2019.

Monett, D. and Lewis, C. W. P. (2019). A brief history of intelligence, and what it means for the future of AI. Expert article, Techerati, March 2019.
"Our understanding of intelligence could be strengthened and reinforced if we had well-defined definitions of intelligence, the advantages of which would be: a better educated general public, more synergy between politics and society (since the understanding of what (machine) intelligence is will diminish the fears of technological innovation), as well as enhanced understanding and knowledge of other capabilities that could contribute to the development of advanced intelligent systems and human-computer interactions."

Monett, D. (2018). Can AI be freed from the misinterpretations heaped upon it? Keynote at the Advanced Analytics & AI, TechWeek 2018, Messe Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, 07 - 08 November, 2018.

Monett, D. (2018). A Question of Machine Intelligence – Strong arguments in support of and against different definitions. Keynote at the M3 London, Minds Mastering Machines Conference, 15 - 17 October, 2018.

Monett, D. and Lewis, C. W. P. (2018). Getting clarity by defining Artificial Intelligence - A Survey. In Müller, Vincent C. (Ed.), Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence 2017. SAPERE 44 (pp. 212-214). Berlin: Springer.
"We present the preliminary results of our research survey Defining (machine) Intelligence. Opinions, from a cross sector of professionals, to help create a unified message on the goal and definition of A.I."

Lewis, C. W. P. and Monett, D. (2018). Text Analysis of Unstructured Data on Definitions of Intelligence. In Proceedings of The 2018 Meeting of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy, IACAP 2018, pp. 1-8, 21 - 23 June, 2018, Warsaw, Poland.

Lewis, C. W. P. and Monett, D. (2018). AGISI.org – Written evidence (AIC0184). In Collated Written Evidence Volume: AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?, pp. 30-38, Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, The Authority of the House of Lords, 2018.

Lewis, C. W. P. and Monett, D. (2017). AI & Machine Learning Black Boxes: The Need for Transparency and Accountability. Expert article in KDnuggets, April 2017.
"When something goes wrong, as it inevitably does, it can be a daunting task discovering the behavior that caused an event that is locked away inside a black box where discoverability is virtually impossible."


Announcements


Written evidence on AI: AGISI's comments to the UK government
AGISI submitted its comments on AI to the Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, UK Parliament. The Call for Evidence on Artificial Intelligence asked for written evidence on the current state of AI, the factors technical or societal that will accelerate or hinder its development, and its impact on society, among other topics.

How published:
Lewis, C. W. P. and Monett, D. (2018). AGISI.org – Written evidence (AIC0184). In Collated Written Evidence Volume: AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?, pp. 30-38, Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, The Authority of the House of Lords, 2018.

Read AGISI's Evidence



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Getting clarity by defining Artificial Intelligence - A Survey, poster to the 3rd Conference on Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence, PT-AI 2017, Leeds, UK, 04 - 05 November, 2017.

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