MIT is launching a major project that has been described as a do-over of several decades of AI research. From a recent news article:

The new project, launched with an initial $5 million grant and a five-year timetable, is called the Mind Machine Project, or MMP, a loosely bound collaboration of about two dozen professors, researchers, students and postdocs. According to Neil Gershenfeld, one of the leaders of MMP and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, one of the project’s goals is to create intelligent machines — “whatever that means.”

The project is “revisiting fundamental assumptions” in all of the areas encompassed by the field of AI, including the nature of the mind and of memory, and how intelligence can be manifested in physical form, says Gershenfeld, professor of media arts and sciences. “Essentially, we want to rewind to 30 years ago and revisit some ideas that had gotten frozen,” he says, adding that the new group hopes to correct “fundamental mistakes” made in AI research over the years.

Our homework for Sunday is to read the full article http://web.mit.edu/ne...

At the MeetUp we will read and discuss this proposal (well, news article) in detail, paragraph by paragraph. You in the MeetUp will be the main critics and/or supporters of the proposal. I will declare my personal bias upfront: It does not go far enough. We see attempts to move in the direction of Holistic Methods but they stop way before crossing the border. Embodiment (another one of our favorite topics at the MeetUp) also made it into the proposal. Note that there is more to read at the project site ttp://mmp.cba.mit.edu but we'll mainly discuss the news article in order to keep homework manageable.

As usual, don't be surprised if the discussion veers off from this topic into other areas of AI.

Image credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT News Office; used with permission.