A new paradigm is needed for muddy tasks that humans do well but existing machines do not. This new paradigm is motivated by human cognitive and behavioral development from infancy to adulthood. Central in the new paradigm is a new kind of algorithm, called developmental algorithm. The human developmental algorithm enables humans to develop mentally from infancy to adulthood. A developmental algorithm for machines enables the machines to learn new tasks without a need for re-programming.
Development includes learning but needs more.
It requires a human programmer to writes a program that enables a machine to learn subjects that the programmer does not understand, or even could not predict. This paradigm unifies capabilities that we now consider very different, such as vision, speech, language, reasoning, planning, decision making, navigation, object manipulation, human-machine interactions, etc. This new paradigm raises a series of new interesting research issues. This talk will describe the SAIL project whose goal is to develop developmental machines using this new paradigm. Some results will be presented through a video presentation.