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{{short description, Aspect of system integration regarding artificial intelligence The core idea of
Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
systems integration System integration is defined in engineering as the process of bringing together the component sub-systems into one system (an aggregation of subsystems cooperating so that the system is able to deliver the overarching functionality) and ensuring ...
is making individual
software component Component-based software engineering (CBSE), also called component-based development (CBD), is a branch of software engineering that emphasizes the separation of concerns with respect to the wide-ranging functionality available throughout a give ...
s, such as
speech synthesizer Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conve ...
s, interoperable with other components, such as common sense knowledgebases, in order to create larger, broader and more capable A.I. systems. The main methods that have been proposed for integration are message routing, or communication protocols that the software components use to communicate with each other, often through a middleware
blackboard system A blackboard system is an artificial intelligence approach based on the blackboard architectural model, where a common knowledge base, the "blackboard", is iteratively updated by a diverse group of specialist knowledge sources, starting with a pro ...
. Most artificial intelligence systems involve some sort of integrated technologies, for example, the integration of speech synthesis technologies with that of speech recognition. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing discussion on the importance of systems integration as a field in its own right. Proponents of this approach are researchers such as
Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, an ...
,
Aaron Sloman Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that ...
,
Deb Roy Deb Roy is a Canadian scientist, tenured professor at MIT, and the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. Roy received a bachelor of applied science in computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD in Medi ...
,
Kristinn R. Thórisson Kristinn R. Thórisson (Þórisson) is an Icelandic artificial intelligence researcher, founder and Managing Director of the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines (IIIM), and co-founder and former co-director of the Center for Analysis and ...
and Michael A. Arbib. A reason for the recent attention A.I. integration is attracting is that there have already been created a number of (relatively) simple A.I. systems for specific problem domains (such as
computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...
,
speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...
, etc.), and that integrating what's already available is a more logical approach to broader A.I. than building monolithic systems from scratch.


Integration Focus

The focus on systems' integration, especially with regard to modular approaches, derive from the fact that most intelligences of significant scales are composed of a multitude of processes and/or utilize multi-modal input and output. For example, a humanoid-type of intelligence would preferably have to be able to talk using speech synthesis, hear using speech recognition, understand using a logical (or some other undefined) mechanism, and so forth. In order to produce artificially intelligent software of broader intelligence, integration of these modalities is necessary.


Challenges & solutions

Collaboration is an integral part of
software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...
as evidenced by the size of software companies and the size of their software departments. Among the tools to ease software collaboration are various procedures and standards that developers can follow to ensure quality, reliability and that their software is compatible with software created by others (such as
W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
standards for webpage development). However, collaboration in fields of A.I. has been lacking, for the most part not seen outside the respected schools, departments or research institutes (and sometimes not within them either). This presents practitioners of A.I. systems integration with a substantial problem and often causes A.I. researchers to have to 're-invent the wheel' each time they want a specific functionality to work with their software. Even more damaging is the "not invented here" syndrome, which manifests itself in a strong reluctance of A.I. researchers to build on the work of others. The outcome of this in A.I. is a large set of "solution islands": A.I. research has produced numerous isolated software components and mechanisms that deal with various parts of intelligence separately. To take some examples: *Speech synthesis **FreeTTS from CMU *Speech recognition **Sphinx from CMU *Logical reasoning **Open
Cyc Cyc (pronounced ) is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc f ...
from
Cycorp Cyc (pronounced ) is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc f ...
**
Open Mind Common Sense Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands ...
Net from
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
With the increased popularity of the
free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...
, a lot of the software being created, including A.I. systems, is available for public exploit. The next natural step is to merge these individual software components into coherent, intelligent systems of a broader nature. As a multitude of components (that often serve the same purpose) have already been created by the community, the most accessible way of integration is giving each of these components an easy way to communicate with each other. By doing so, each component by itself becomes a module, which can then be tried in various settings and configurations of larger architectures. Many online communities for A.I. developers exist where tutorials, examples, and forums aim at helping both beginners and experts build intelligent systems. However, few communities have succeeded in making a certain standard or a code of conduct popular to allow the large collection of miscellaneous systems to be integrated with any ease.


Methodologies


Constructionist Design Methodology

The
Constructionist design methodology {{short description, Aspect of system integration regarding artificial intelligence The core idea of Artificial Intelligence systems integration is making individual software components, such as speech synthesizers, interoperable with other componen ...
(CDM, or 'Constructionist A.I.') is a formal methodology proposed in 2004, for use in the development of cognitive robotics, communicative humanoids and broad AI systems. The creation of such systems requires the integration of a large number of functionalities that must be carefully coordinated to achieve coherent system behavior. CDM is based on iterative design steps that lead to the creation of a network of named interacting modules, communicating via explicitly typed streams and discrete messages. The OpenAIR message protocol (see below) was inspired by the CDM and has frequently been used to aid in the development of intelligent systems using CDM.


Examples of Integrated Systems

* ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and QRIO, Sony's version of a humanoid robot. * Cog, M.I.T. humanoid robot project under the direction of
Rodney Brooks Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Profes ...
. *
AIBO AIBO (''stylized aibo, Artificial Intelligence Robot'', homonymous with , "pal" or "partner" in Japanese) is a series of robotic dogs designed and manufactured by Sony. Sony announced a prototype Aibo in mid-1998, and the first consumer model wa ...
, Sony's robot dog, integrates vision, hearing and motorskills. *
TOPIO TOPIO ("TOSY Ping Pong Playing Robot") is a bipedal humanoid robot designed to play table tennis against a human being. It has been developed since 2005 by TOSY, a robotics firm in Vietnam. It was publicly demonstrated at the Tokyo International ...
, TOSY's humanoid robot can play ping-pong with human


See also

*
Hybrid intelligent system Hybrid intelligent system denotes a software system which employs, in parallel, a combination of methods and techniques from artificial intelligence subfields, such as: * Neuro-symbolic systems * Neuro-fuzzy systems * Hybrid connectionist-symbolic ...
, systems that combine the methods of Conventional A.I. (or GOFAI) & that of
Computational intelligence The expression computational intelligence (CI) usually refers to the ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or experimental observation. Even though it is commonly considered a synonym of soft computing, there is still no c ...
. *
Humanoid robot A humanoid robot is a robot resembling the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other pur ...
s utilize systems integration intensely. *
Constructionist design methodology {{short description, Aspect of system integration regarding artificial intelligence The core idea of Artificial Intelligence systems integration is making individual software components, such as speech synthesizers, interoperable with other componen ...
*
Cognitive architecture A cognitive architecture refers to both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. The formalized mod ...
s


References


Notes


Constructionist Design Methodology, published in A.I. magazineMissionEngine: Multi-system integration using Python in the Tactical Language Project


External links


The Open Knowledge Initiative Library
AI software Software architecture System integration