Mladjan Jovanovic

Slavisa Aleksic, Michael Atanasov, Jean Calleja Agius et al.

The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely (i) lifelogging and self-monitoring, (ii) remote monitoring of vital signs, (iii) emotional state recognition, (iv) food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, (v) activity and personal assistance, (vi) gesture recognition, (vii) fall detection and prevention, (viii) mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and (ix) cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted.

Peter Voss, Mladjan Jovanovic

The original vision of AI was re-articulated in 2002 via the term 'Artificial General Intelligence' or AGI. This vision is to build 'Thinking Machines' - computer systems that can learn, reason, and solve problems similar to the way humans do. This is in stark contrast to the 'Narrow AI' approach practiced by almost everyone in the field over the many decades. While several large-scale efforts have nominally been working on AGI (most notably DeepMind), the field of pure focused AGI development has not been well funded or promoted. This is surprising given the fantastic value that true AGI can bestow on humanity. In addition to the dearth of effort in this field, there are also several theoretical and methodical missteps that are hampering progress. We highlight why purely statistical approaches are unlikely to lead to AGI, and identify several crucial cognitive abilities required to achieve human-like adaptability and autonomous learning. We conclude with a survey of socio-technical factors that have undoubtedly slowed progress towards AGI.

Mladjan Jovanovic, Peter Voss

Incremental learning is the ability of systems to acquire knowledge over time, enabling their adaptation and generalization to novel tasks. It is a critical ability for intelligent, real-world systems, especially when data changes frequently or is limited. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of incremental learning in Large Language Models. It synthesizes the state-of-the-art incremental learning paradigms, including continual learning, meta-learning, parameter-efficient learning, and mixture-of-experts learning. We demonstrate their utility for incremental learning by describing specific achievements from these related topics and their critical factors. An important finding is that many of these approaches do not update the core model, and none of them update incrementally in real-time. The paper highlights current problems and challenges for future research in the field. By consolidating the latest relevant research developments, this review offers a comprehensive understanding of incremental learning and its implications for designing and developing LLM-based learning systems.

Peter Voss, Mladjan Jovanovic

Little demonstrable progress has been made toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) since the term was coined some 20 years ago. In spite of the fantastic breakthroughs in Statistical AI such as AlphaZero, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion none of these projects have, or claim to have, a clear path to AGI. In order to expedite the development of AGI it is crucial to understand and identify the core requirements of human-like intelligence as it pertains to AGI. From that one can distill which particular development steps are necessary to achieve AGI, and which are a distraction. Such analysis highlights the need for a Cognitive AI approach rather than the currently favored statistical and generative efforts. More specifically it identifies the central role of concepts in human-like cognition. Here we outline an architecture and development plan, together with some preliminary results, that offers a much more direct path to full Human-Level AI (HLAI)/ AGI.

Mladjan Jovanovic, Antonella De Angeli, Andrew McNeill et al.

Active aging technologies are increasingly designed to support an active lifestyle. However, the way in which they are designed can raise different barriers to acceptance of and use by older adults. Their designers can adopt a negative stereotype of aging. Thorough understanding of user requirements is central to this problem. This paper investigates user requirements for technologies that encourage an active lifestyle and provide older people with the means to self-manage their physical, mental, and emotional health. This requires consideration of the person and the sociotechnical context of use. We describe our work in collecting and analyzing older adults' requirements for a technology which enables an active lifestyle. The main contribution of the paper is a model of user requirements for inclusive technology for older people.

Mladjan Jovanovic, Aleksandar Jevremovic, Milica Pejovic-Milovancevic

Mental healthcare has seen numerous benefits from interactive technologies and artificial intelligence. Various interventions have successfully used intelligent technologies to automate the assessment and evaluation of psychological treatments and mental well-being and functioning. These technologies include different types of robots, video games, and conversational agents. The paper critically analyzes existing solutions with the outlooks for their future. In particular, we: i)give an overview of the technology for mental health, ii) critically analyze the technology against the proposed criteria, and iii) provide the design outlooks for these technologies.

Jasna Petrovic, Mladjan Jovanovic

Conversational practice, while crucial for all language learners, can be challenging to get enough of and very expensive. Chatbots are computer programs developed to engage in conversations with humans. They are designed as software avatars with limited, but growing conversational capability. The most natural and potentially powerful application of chatbots is in line with their fundamental nature - language practice. However, their role and outcomes within (in)formal language learning are currently tangential at best. Existing research in the area has generally focused on chatbots' comprehensibility and the motivation they inspire in their users. In this paper, we provide an overview of the chatbots for learning languages, critically analyze existing approaches, and discuss the major challenges for future work.