Curious Minded Machine: Honda teams up with MIT and other universities to create an AI that wants to learn

Honda has come up with a program called Curious Minded Machine (CMM) to expand cognitive robotics research. This is a program to create artificial intelligence that enables ‘learning’ with a human-like sense of curiosity.

What is the Curious Minded Machine program?

The idea is to build a model based on how children ‘learn to learn’. By observing human interactions and how they perform tasks, CMM can learn better ways to achieve goals. This initiative explores Cooperative Intelligence (CI), AI embedded in a social context enabling people to confidence and trust with AI systems.

Soshi Iba, a principal scientist at Honda Research Institute USA, Inc says: “Our ultimate goal is to create new types of machines that can acquire an interest in learning and knowledge, and the ability to interact with the world and others. We want to develop Curious Minded Machines that use curiosity to serve the common good by understanding people's needs, empowering human capability, and ultimately addressing complex societal issues.”

Who is in the program by Honda?

This three-year program will include efforts from the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

The areas tackled by the research teams participating with Honda are:

MIT CSAIL: They are addressing a key limitation in robotic action planning. The focus is on establishing a causal theory of sensor percepts, which will help in predicting future percepts and the effect of future actions.

Penn Engineering: This team from Pennsylvania is focusing on challenges in machine perception by learning from biological systems. Then applying an embodied, active and efficient approach towards acquiring representations of the surrounding world and actions.

University of Washington: They are addressing the challenges to enable robots working effectively in human environments. Similar to a human child learning through exploration and curiosity, they aim to build a mathematical model of curiosity.