Citation
Sun, Ron. "Chapter 4: The Motivational and Meta-Cognitive Subsystems." "A Tutorial on CLARION 5.0." Department of Cognitive Science. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 6 Oct. 2009.
http://www.sts.rpi.edu/~rsun/sun.tutorial.pdf
Summary / Assessment
In this chapter, the Motivational Subsystem (MS) and the Meta-Cognitive Subsystem (MCS) of the CLARION architecture are described. The MS is concerned with an agent’s drives and their interactions (i.e. – why an agent does what it does and why it chooses any particular action over another). The MCS controls and regulates cognitive processes. The MCS accomplishes this, for example, by setting goals for the agent and by managing ongoing processes of learning and interactions with the surrounding environment.
Dr. Sun mentions that motivational and meta-level processes are required for an agent to meet the following criteria when performing actions: sustainability, purposefulness, focus, and adaptivity. Sustainability refers to an agent attending to basic needs for survival (i.e. – hunger, thirst, and avoiding danger). Purposefulness refers to an agent selecting activities that will accomplish goals, as opposed to selecting activities completely randomly. Focus refers to an agent’s need to focus its activities on fulfilling a specific purpose. Adaptivity refers to the need of an agent to adapt (i.e. – to learn) to improve its sustainability, purposefulness, and focus.
When modeling a cognitive agent, it is important to include the following considerations concerning drives. Proportional Activation: Activation of drives should be proportional to offsets or deficits within the agent (such as the degree of the lack of nourishment). Opportunism: Opportunities must be factored in when choosing between alternative actions (ex: availability of water may lead an agent to choose drinking water over gathering food, provided that the food deficit is not too high). Contiguity of Actions: A tendency to continue the current action sequence to avoid the overhead of switching to a different action sequence (i.e. – avoid “thrashing”). Persistence: Actions to satisfy a drive should persist beyond minimum satisfaction. Interruption When Necessary: Actions for a higher priority drive should be interrupted when a more urgent drive arises. Combination of Preferences: Preferences resulting from different drives could be combined to generate a higher-order preference. Performing a “compromise candidate” action may not be the best for any single drive, but is best in terms of the combined preference.
Specific drives are then discussed. Drives are segmented into three categories: Low-Level Drives, High-Level Drives, and Derived Secondary Drives. Low-Level drives include physiological needs such as: get-food, get-water, avoid-danger, get-sleep, and reproduce. Low-Level drives also include “saturation drives” such as: avoid-water-saturation, and avoid-food-saturation. High-Level drives include “needs” such as: belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization (and others from Maslow’s needs hierarchy). Derived Secondary Drives include: gradually acquired drives through conditioning (i.e. – associating a secondary goal to a primary drive), and externally set drives (i.e. – drives resulting from the desire to please superiors in a work environment).
Meta-cognition refers to one’s knowledge of one’s own cognitive process. It also refers to the monitoring and orchestration of cognitive processes in the service of some concrete goal or objective. These concepts are operationalized within CLARION’s MCS through the following processes: 1) Behavioral Aims: which set goals and their reinforcements, 2) Information Filtering: which determines the selection of input values from the environment, 3) Information Acquisition: which selects learning methods, 4) Information Utilization: which refers to reasoning, 5) Outcome Selection: or determining the appropriate outputs, 6) Cognitive Modes: or the selection of explicit processing, implicit processing, or combination thereof, and 7)Parameter Settings: such as parameters for learning capability (i.e. – intelligence level).
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
A Summary of "The Key Characteristics of Produsage" from "Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond - From Production to Produsage"
Citation
Bruns, Axel. "The Key Characteristics of Produsage." Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond - From Production to Produsage. New York, NY.: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, 2008-2009. 9-36.
Summary / Assessment
In the second chapter of “Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond”, Axel Bruns discusses the idea of Produsage. He begins the chapter by giving background information on the traditional model of production. The traditional model contains three clearly defined, separate tasks: the producer, the distributor, and the consumer. One side effect of the traditional model is consumers are not active in product development. Highly competitive producers shield product development thereby making consumer involvement impossible. The traditional model gradually changed to involve consumers in a limited manner through focus groups and general market research. The consumer became more than just an end user of fixed products. Through feedback, the consumer was able to alter products based on his/her needs. (The term “prosumer” is used to describe such consumers.)
Bruns then discusses how the Internet shifts information consumption to information usage, and how it challenges the traditional stance on information production. He demonstrates this shift through the following points: With the internet, information access is on a pull-basis, rather than a traditional push-basis. Access to producing and distributing information is readily available and is not as limited as it once was. With technology, users can communicate and engage directly with one another, bypassing the traditional model. Digital information can be shared quickly and can be remixed to create new artifacts.
By means of the Internet, producers are able to move from the traditional hierarchical model to the distributed and communal network model. The term “hive-mind” is used to describe such a model. Here, users are intercreative and there is a “collective intelligence” that emerges. Four attributes of the collective model are identified: 1) Problem solving is probabilistic, not directed. Users can take a more holistic view of the system, leading to contributions in areas outside of those they may have been bounded to within a more traditional approach. 2) Equipotentiallity, not hierarchy. Equipotentiallity is the assumption that each participant can make constructive contributions to the system. 3) Granular tasks. Tasks should not be too complex to require significant administrative overhead. The size of each task must support probabilistic problem solving and Equipotentiallity of contributors. 4) Content is shared, not owned. Sharing content is fundamental to collaboration and supports the three previous points.
With a communal/network model, the idea of Produsage is possible. The cogently terse definition of Produsage given by the author is “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in the pursuit of further improvement.” The four principles of Produsage are: 1) Open Participation, Communal Evaluation. The basic idea here is that all users are able to participate in achieving the goal, and the more users participating, the more probability there is of identifying the most appropriate/correct solution. 2) Fluid Hierarchy, AD Hoc Meritocracy. “Ad-hocracies” are fluidly built based on the ideas of Equipotentiallity and communal evaluation. Users who actively contribute relevant material to the group have a higher standing, conversely, the user’s standing within the group can diminish if the quality of their contributions decline. 3) Unfinished Artifacts, Continuing process. The idea is that Produsage does not work towards the completion of products, but rather through iteration, creates successfully better products (i.e. - artifacts). 4) Common Property, Individual Rewards. Instead of focusing on monetary rewards, participation in Produsage is motivated by contributing to a communal purpose. These non-monetary rewards grow a community by encouraging individuals to make continual contributions to the overall goal.
Bruns, Axel. "The Key Characteristics of Produsage." Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond - From Production to Produsage. New York, NY.: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, 2008-2009. 9-36.
Summary / Assessment
In the second chapter of “Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond”, Axel Bruns discusses the idea of Produsage. He begins the chapter by giving background information on the traditional model of production. The traditional model contains three clearly defined, separate tasks: the producer, the distributor, and the consumer. One side effect of the traditional model is consumers are not active in product development. Highly competitive producers shield product development thereby making consumer involvement impossible. The traditional model gradually changed to involve consumers in a limited manner through focus groups and general market research. The consumer became more than just an end user of fixed products. Through feedback, the consumer was able to alter products based on his/her needs. (The term “prosumer” is used to describe such consumers.)
Bruns then discusses how the Internet shifts information consumption to information usage, and how it challenges the traditional stance on information production. He demonstrates this shift through the following points: With the internet, information access is on a pull-basis, rather than a traditional push-basis. Access to producing and distributing information is readily available and is not as limited as it once was. With technology, users can communicate and engage directly with one another, bypassing the traditional model. Digital information can be shared quickly and can be remixed to create new artifacts.
By means of the Internet, producers are able to move from the traditional hierarchical model to the distributed and communal network model. The term “hive-mind” is used to describe such a model. Here, users are intercreative and there is a “collective intelligence” that emerges. Four attributes of the collective model are identified: 1) Problem solving is probabilistic, not directed. Users can take a more holistic view of the system, leading to contributions in areas outside of those they may have been bounded to within a more traditional approach. 2) Equipotentiallity, not hierarchy. Equipotentiallity is the assumption that each participant can make constructive contributions to the system. 3) Granular tasks. Tasks should not be too complex to require significant administrative overhead. The size of each task must support probabilistic problem solving and Equipotentiallity of contributors. 4) Content is shared, not owned. Sharing content is fundamental to collaboration and supports the three previous points.
With a communal/network model, the idea of Produsage is possible. The cogently terse definition of Produsage given by the author is “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in the pursuit of further improvement.” The four principles of Produsage are: 1) Open Participation, Communal Evaluation. The basic idea here is that all users are able to participate in achieving the goal, and the more users participating, the more probability there is of identifying the most appropriate/correct solution. 2) Fluid Hierarchy, AD Hoc Meritocracy. “Ad-hocracies” are fluidly built based on the ideas of Equipotentiallity and communal evaluation. Users who actively contribute relevant material to the group have a higher standing, conversely, the user’s standing within the group can diminish if the quality of their contributions decline. 3) Unfinished Artifacts, Continuing process. The idea is that Produsage does not work towards the completion of products, but rather through iteration, creates successfully better products (i.e. - artifacts). 4) Common Property, Individual Rewards. Instead of focusing on monetary rewards, participation in Produsage is motivated by contributing to a communal purpose. These non-monetary rewards grow a community by encouraging individuals to make continual contributions to the overall goal.
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