David A. Rosenblueth

Noe Hernandez, Kerstin Eder, Evgeni Magid et al.

The formal verification of properties of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is highly desirable for gaining confidence in the correctness of the model and the corresponding system. A significant step towards HMM verification was the development by Zhang et al. of a family of logics for verifying HMMs, called POCTL*, and its model checking algorithm. As far as we know, the verification tool we present here is the first one based on Zhang et al.'s approach. As an example of its effective application, we verify properties of a handover task in the context of human-robot interaction. Our tool was implemented in Haskell, and the experimental evaluation was performed using the humanoid robot Bert2.

Tom Froese, Carlos Gershenson, David A. Rosenblueth

The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the "coupling-constitution fallacy". In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.