Symbiotic Cognitive Computing

Abstract

In 2011, IBM's Watson competed on the game show Jeopardy! winning against the two best players of all time, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings (Ferrucci et al. 2010). Since this demonstration, IBM has expanded its research program in artificial intelligence (AI), including the areas of natural language processing and machine learning (Kelly and Hamm 2013). Ultimately, IBM sees the opportunity to develop cognitive computing -a unified and universal platform for computational intelligence (Modha et al. 2011). But how might cognitive computing work in real environmentsand in concert with people?In 2013, our group within IBM Research started to explore how to embed cognitive computing in physical environments. We built a Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL) (see figure 1) as a living lab to explore how people and cognitive computing come together.Our effort focuses not only on the physical and computational substrate, but also on the users' experience. We envision a fluid and natural interaction that extends through time across multiple environments (office, meeting room, living room, car, mobile). In this view, cognitive computing systems are always on and available to engage with people in the environment. The system appears to follow individual users, or groups of users, as they change environments, seamlessly connecting the users to available input and output devices and extending their reach beyond their own cognitive and sensory abilities.We call this symbiotic cognitive computing: computation that takes place when people and intelligent agents come together in a physical space to interact with one another. The intelligent agents use a computational substrate of "cogs" for visual object recognition, natural language parsing, probabilistic decision support, and other functions. the book The Society of Mind where Marvin Minsky likened agents to "cogs of great machines" (Minsky 1988). These cogs are available to intelligent agents through programmatic interfaces and to human participants through user interfaces.Our long-term goal is to produce a physical and computational environment that measurably improves the performance of groups on key tasks requiring large amounts of data and significant mental effort, such as information discovery, situational assessment, product design, and strategic decision making. To date, we have focused specifically on building a cognitive environment, a physical space embedded with cognitive computing systems, to support business meetings for strategic decision making. Other applications include corporate meetings exploring potential mergers and acquisitions, executive meetings on whether to purchase oil fields, and utility company meetings to address electrical grid outages. These meetings often bring together a group of participants with varied roles, skills, expertise, and points of view. They involve making decisions with a large number of high-impact choices that need to be evaluated on multiple dimensions taking into account large amounts of structured and unstructured data.While...

Strong Cognitive Symbiosis: Cognitive Computing for Humans

“…They built a Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL) to explore how people and cognitive computing implementations work together [30,31]. The CEL approach sees the role of the computer as a "super expert", which interacts with people, offering advice and information based on superior computational power.…”

“…The key observation is that Neo-Symbiosis uses specific theories about cognition to construct tools that support cognition at specific points of possible failure, whereas the CEL approach is to provide assistance during tasks that have been observed as difficult in work settings experienced over time. Thus, Farell et al propose five key principles of symbiotic cognitive computing: "context, connection, representation, modularity, and adaption" [31]. The principles are derived by "reflecting upon the state of human-computer interaction with intelligent agents and on our own experiences attempting to create effective symbiotic interactions in the CEL" ( [31], p. 84).…”

Strong Cognitive Symbiosis: Cognitive Computing for Humans

“…They built a Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL) to explore how people and their cognitive computing implementations work together [20,21]. The CEL approach sees the role of the computer as a "super expert" which interacts with people, offering advice and information based on superior computational power.…”

“…The key observation is that Neo-Symbiosis uses specific theories about cognition to construct tools which support cognition at specific points of possible failure, whereas the CEL approach is to provide assistance during tasks which have been observed as difficult in work settings experienced over time. [21] propose five key principles of symbiotic cognitive computing: "context, connection, representation, modularity, and adaption." The principles are derived by "reflecting upon the state of human-computer interaction with intelligent agents and on our own experiences attempting to create effective symbiotic interactions in the CEL" ( [21], p.84).…”

“…[21] propose five key principles of symbiotic cognitive computing: "context, connection, representation, modularity, and adaption." The principles are derived by "reflecting upon the state of human-computer interaction with intelligent agents and on our own experiences attempting to create effective symbiotic interactions in the CEL" ( [21], p.84).…”