CKI Cognitive Artificial Intelligence

What is CKI? CKI stands for Cognitieve Kunstmatige Intellegentie, or in English Cognitive Artificial Intelligence. AI is a broad area, to which many different specialist, like computer-scientists, psychologists, linguists, knowledge-theorists, biologists (to name but a few), have contributed. 'Cognitive' is derived from the Latin 'cognitio', the ability to know or understand. CKI asks how one implements knowledge into a computer and how computers can handle this knowledge. In this area of AI especially psychologists, linguists, logicists, knowledge-theorists and computer-scientists are active. To put it in another way, this area of AI is concerned with what is important to make computers into useful knowledge, languages and reasoning aids. The progress in this area is quick, the last years research and application-techniques using artificial neural networks, have grown explosively. And at the moment the interest in genetic algorithms and artificial life is starting to expand. CKI was founded in 1980 and is the oldest full time degree of it's kind in the Netherlands. In general it can be said that CKI studies: -the structure of knowledge -the obtaining, representation and storage of knowledge -the modification of knowledge and the reasoning with it To put knowledge into a computersystem, it is of course not sufficient to dictate an encyclopedia to it. That is not knowledge, it is only text. It only becomes knowledge when it obtains a structure with which the computer can work. For this, it is thus necessary to have some insight into the structure of knowledge and the implementation of it. These questions have been studied for quite a time in the subjects knowledge-theory and logic, subjects that are part of the Department of Philosophy. This explains why CKI is an initiative of the the Department of Philosophy. If you want to put knowledge into a computer and let the computer reason with it, it is useful to know how humans obtain and work with knowledge. To implement AI, it's first necessary to know more about what natural intelligence is. These matters are studied in Psychology. In knowledge and reasoning language plays an important role. Language is closely connected to knowledge and is also an important carrier of knowledge. Linguistics studies not a specific language, but language in general is studied. Finally, a computersystem has to be designed. Here tools from the computer-sciences are used: programwriting-techniques and languages. These five disciplines (knowledge-theory, logic, linguistics, psychology and computer-sciences) are the main disciplines concerned with CKI.