A Semiotic View of Social Intelligence for Realizing Human-Machine Symbiotic Systems

Abstract

In a coming ubiquitous society, the collaboration between the human and the semi-automated machine is inevitable. The core difficulty herein is that cognitive agents (i.e., human and robot) are characterized as creative and adaptable to and within their environments. To tackle this problem, we have to clarify how the cognitive agent recognizes the external environment as well as other agents’ behavioural performances, and how the context determines their cognition and makes the agent extract a particular meaning out of the physical and/or social environment. In this talk, we focus on the design issues of the mutual and inseparable relationships between the external environment including others and the internal constructs of the agent that is an actor, an observer, a cognizer, and an interpreter. For this purpose, we introduce the subject of “semiosis”, which is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meanings. After reviewing the original idea of Peirce’s semiosis, our extended definition of the semiosis will be provided. That is, we define semiosis as “a process of constructing internal models within the cognitive agent” coherent to a target system in the environment to use, to monitor, to control, to collaborate with, etc. Based upon this, the research can be divided into the following thee kinds of topics. The first one is on the semiotic analysis of the complex behaviours of the existing artefact systems and of the complex tasks that the user is forced to perform and to be instructed by some others. The second one is on the semiotic design of artefacts so that they should be coherent to cognitive agents’ recognition, wherein the targets to be designed are focused on “signs” that are visible and eligible to the cognitive agents either directly or via interface systems. Finally, the third one is on the design of collaborative activities by a pair of cognitive agents (i.e., teaching tasks and/or learning tasks) via a variety of signs. With respect to this, the design and communication issues of human-centered automation and of ambient intelligence will be discussed in terms of the semiotic frame. This work is fully supported by a Grant-in-Aid Creative Scientific Research 2007-2011 (19GS0208) funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.