COS623: Cognitive System Design (CS, Systems)

This course covers the methodology of designing cognitive systems through a historical overview of the field, the review of cognitive architectures, and the hands-on experimentation with cognitive architecture platforms. It considers the environment within which the system will operate, and discusses how to represent the salient features of that environment. It continues to investigate how the cognitive system interacts with the environment, specifying the characteristics of the sensors and actuators of the system. It investigates how to represent information internally in the system, and how to analyze the characteristics that this representation should have in terms of accessibility, scalability, persistence of the information. It then examines the processes internal to cognitive system that operate on the information, and analyzes the processes of learning and reasoning in terms of their desired behaviors, the guarantees they should offer, and their interaction. It concludes by considering ways to evaluate the performance of a cognitive system, and the process of error analysis for debugging and improving its performance.