Name:Paulo Garrido
Email address:pgarrido@dei.uminho.pt
URL of home page:*Will be available soon*
Postal address:
Universidade do Minho/Departamento de Electronica Industrial/
R. Gulbenkian,115/4700 Braga/Portugal
Phone:351-53-615010
Affiliations:
Department of Industrial Electronics
School of Engineering
University of Minho
How did you hear about PCP? Navigating in the Net.
Please take at least one page to describe your work
and how it might relate to PCP:
I've been interested in Cybernetics and System Sciences long ago before
my graduation in Electrical Engineering. When I joined University
of Minho I began working with control applied to industrial systems. I
started my PhD work under the theme of application of IA techniques to
control, but I managed to diverge to a question which interested me
more: how logical thinking could possibly have emerged in brains made up
of biological neurons? Somewhere in-between this question and the practical
constraints, I got to write some one hundred pages on the integration of
logic programming (LP) and neural networks (NN) computing models. The
key idea is that elementary computing operations (in the Post or Maslov
sense of computing as abstract deduction) may have its outcomes
(match/no-match) governed by different metric functions between operands
(ex. unification in LP, euclidean distance in NN).
Before I had the time to explore the implications of such an idea, I followed a
suggestion of E. Oliveira, leader of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence
Group of Oporto University, and together we made a paper about Cognitive
Cooperation Facilitators (in the Web). Then I proceeded to study the ideas of
Maturana and Varela about autopoiesis in order to prove or disprove that
computational agents can be autopoietic... As a result I produced a tech report
about metaphors of knowledge in computing design paradigms.
There are some ways as my work may relate to PCP. First, knowledge may be
encoded in many ways, but to be useful, knowledge codes must be matched against
other codes which represent actual situations, inferences, hypothesis, etc.
There are many possible ways to do this, but it seems to me that only two or
three have been explored. I think that variation of the metric properties which
define when a match occurs may be a key point to understand how brain works -
eventually complex predicates are computed by sophisticated matching functions,
not by lengthy programs! Currently I am interested in reading Computing Theory
at this light, but this can turn to be illuminating also if one thinks of
knowledge as a key resource of cybernetic systems.
Second, I am very interested in Cooperation Theory, mainly cooperation at the
cognitive level. I think that present days competition based societies (and
mankind) will be unable to solve the major problem we can face: the survival
and sustained development of the people and of the values human evolution
created. I think that we do not need much more science and technology of matter
(although practical hydrogen fusion and cheap, gas efficiency comparable
batteries would be useful). I think we need science of how to have people
cooperating (this may prove quite more difficult than hydrogen fusion). We need
theories and we need practice. Cybernetics and System Sciences communities of
thinking have strong responsabilities in this. It is important to understand
why social and ecological processes of cooperation, competition, integration,
exploration exist, how they exist and how they can be changed (if they can).
Finnaly, there is a third aspect of my research interests which directly
relates to PCP. Maybe I am repeating someone else - but I think that it is time
to augment Wiener's definition of Cybernetics to encompass not only Control and
Communication, but also --- Development. We cannot understand complex systems,
life and intelligence only with the notion of Homeostasis, with thinking
centered in the conditions and requisites for the fulfillment of the survival
goal. If Cybernetics is to be a science of the global, then it must understand
not only the principles by how systems survive, but also, how they develop, how
creation of the new can happen.