Individual and Collective Autonomous Development
This vision addresses the need for more adaptive and self-learning systems in ICT, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing research areas rather than introducing a new breakthrough.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling ICT systems to autonomously learn and adapt in complex, unpredictable environments by developing models of themselves and their surroundings, both individually and collectively, without prior knowledge, but does not present specific experimental results or numbers.
The increasing complexity and unpredictability of many ICT scenarios let us envision that future systems will have to dynamically learn how to act and adapt to face evolving situations with little or no a priori knowledge, both at the level of individual components and at the collective level. In other words, such systems should become able to autonomously develop models of themselves and of their environment. Autonomous development includes: learning models of own capabilities; learning how to act purposefully towards the achievement of specific goals; and learning how to act collectively, i.e., accounting for the presence of others. In this paper, we introduce the vision of autonomous development in ICT systems, by framing its key concepts and by illustrating suitable application domains. Then, we overview the many research areas that are contributing or can potentially contribute to the realization of the vision, and identify some key research challenges.