Like the Roman god Janus, cognitive computing projects can have two faces, their science face and their engineering face. The science face fleshes out the global workspace theory of consciousness into a full cognitive model of how minds work. (Please see the tutorial.) The engineering face of cognitive computing explores architectural designs for software information agents and cognitive robots that promise more flexible, more human-like intelligence within their domains. This fleshed out global workspace theory is yielding hopefully testable hypotheses about human cognition. The architectures and mechanisms that underlie intelligence and consciousness in humans can be expected to yield information agents, and cognitive robots that learn continualy, adapt readily to dynamic environments, and behave flexibly and intelligently when faced with novel and unexpected situations. Applications, both in progress and planned, are to various fields, including cognitive robotics and querying image databases with images rather than text.

Name Change
The Cognitive Computing Research Group (CCRG) was previously known as the “Conscious” Software Research Group (CSRG). During the summer of 2006 the name was changed to reflect the group’s evolving emphasis on cognitive modeling including, but not restricted to, consciousness, and the move to robotics applications as well as software agents.