Oscar J. Romero

Oscar J. Romero, John Zimmerman, Aaron Steinfeld et al.

This paper explores the integration of two AI subdisciplines employed in the development of artificial agents that exhibit intelligent behavior: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Cognitive Architectures (CAs). We present three integration approaches, each grounded in theoretical models and supported by preliminary empirical evidence. The modular approach, which introduces four models with varying degrees of integration, makes use of chain-of-thought prompting, and draws inspiration from augmented LLMs, the Common Model of Cognition, and the simulation theory of cognition. The agency approach, motivated by the Society of Mind theory and the LIDA cognitive architecture, proposes the formation of agent collections that interact at micro and macro cognitive levels, driven by either LLMs or symbolic components. The neuro-symbolic approach, which takes inspiration from the CLARION cognitive architecture, proposes a model where bottom-up learning extracts symbolic representations from an LLM layer and top-down guidance utilizes symbolic representations to direct prompt engineering in the LLM layer. These approaches aim to harness the strengths of both LLMs and CAs, while mitigating their weaknesses, thereby advancing the development of more robust AI systems. We discuss the tradeoffs and challenges associated with each approach.

Oscar J. Romero

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are software agents that can perform tasks on behalf of individuals and assist them on many of their daily activities. IPAs capabilities are expanding rapidly due to the recent advances on areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, artificial cognition, and ubiquitous computing, which equip the agents with competences to understand what users say, collect information from everyday ubiquitous devices (e.g., smartphones, wearables, tablets, laptops, cars, household appliances, etc.), learn user preferences, deliver data-driven search results, and make decisions based on user's context. Apart from the inherent complexity of building such IPAs, developers and researchers have to address many critical architectural challenges (e.g., low-latency, scalability, concurrency, ubiquity, code mobility, interoperability, support to cognitive services and reasoning, to name a few.), thereby diverting them from their main goal: building IPAs. Thus, our contribution in this paper is twofold: 1) we propose an architecture for a platform-agnostic, high-performance, ubiquitous, and distributed middleware that alleviates the burdensome task of dealing with low-level implementation details when building IPAs by adding multiple abstraction layers that hide the underlying complexity; and 2) we present an implementation of the middleware that concretizes the aforementioned architecture and allows the development of high-level capabilities while scaling the system up to hundreds of thousands of IPAs with no extra effort. We demonstrate the powerfulness of our middleware by analyzing software metrics for complexity, effort, performance, cohesion and coupling when developing a conversational IPA.

Oscar J. Romero, Sushma A. Akoju

As smartphones become increasingly more powerful, a new generation of highly interactive user-centric mobile apps emerge to make user's life simpler and more productive. Mobile phones applications have to sustain limited resource availability on mobile devices such as battery life, network connectivity while also providing better responsiveness, lightweight interactions within the application. Developers end up spending a considerable amount of time dealing with the architecture constraints imposed by the wide variety of platforms, tools, and devices offered by the mobile ecosystem, thereby diverting them from their main goal of building such apps. Therefore, we propose a mobile-based middleware architecture that alleviates the burdensome task of dealing with low-level architectural decisions and fine-grained implementation details. We achieve such a goal by focusing on the separation of concerns and abstracting away the complexity of orchestrating device sensors and effectors, decision-making processes, and connection to remote services, while providing scaffolding for the development of higher-level functional features of interactive high-performance mobile apps. We demonstrate the powerfulness of our approach vs. Android's conventional framework by comparing different software metric

Oscar J. Romero

Automatic service composition in mobile and pervasive computing faces many challenges due to the complex nature of the environment. Common approaches address service composition from optimization perspectives which are not feasible in practice due to the intractability of the problem, limited computational resources of smart devices, service host's mobility, and time constraints. Our main contribution is the development of a cognitively-inspired agent-based service composition model focused on bounded rationality rather than optimality, which allows the system to compensate for limited resources by selectively filtering out continuous streams of data. The evaluation of our approach shows promising results when compared against state-of-the-art service composition models.