A Philosophically Motivated View on AI and Robotics

摘要

Interview with Aaron Sloman, Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Aaron Sloman holds a BSc (maths and physics at Cape Town (1956). He was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford 1957-60, initially studying mathematics, but switched to logic then philosophy of mathematics defending Immanuel Kant (DPhil 1962). He taught philosophy at Hull University, then Sussex University 1964-91, apart from a year (1972-3) in Edinburgh converting to AI, as a result of a paper criticising Logicist AI at IJCAI 1971. At Sussex, he helped to start undergraduate teaching in programming and AI and later the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS). He helped with the development of the Pop-11 programming language, the Poplog development environment and a lot of AI teaching material. He was a GEC Research Professor 1984-6. In 1991, he moved to Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK. He retired in 2002, but continued as Honorary Professor of AI and Cognitive Science. He is an elected Fellow of AAAI (1991), a Fellow of AISB (1997), and a Fellow of ECCAI (1999). He was awarded an Honorary DSc from Sussex University in 2006 and is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute since 2018. He is currently working full time on the unfunded Turing-inspired Meta-Morphogenesis project (Fig. 1).