We are developing Companion Cognitive Systems, a new kind of software that can be effectively treated as a collaborator. Aside from their potential utility, we believe this effort is important because it focuses on three key problems that must be solved to achieve human-level AI: Robust reasoning and learning, performance and longevity, and interactivity. We describe the ideas we are using to develop the first architecture for Companions: Analogical processing, grounded in cognitive science for reasoning and learning, a distributed agent architecture hosted on a cluster to achieve performance and longevity, and sketching and concept maps to provide interactivity.
Kenneth D. Forbus, Thomas R. Hinrichs