Related papers: The Inspiring Universe
What drives an agent to explore the world while also maintaining control over the environment? From a child at play to scientists in the lab, intelligent agents must balance curiosity (the drive to seek knowledge) with competence (the drive…
The Pierre Auger Observatory, dedicated to measuring ultra-high energy cosmic rays, has been promoting for more than two decades educational and scientific outreach activities to make its results known in an understandable language to…
If scientific discovery is one of the main driving forces of human progress, insight is the fuel for the engine, which has long attracted behavior-level research to understand and model its underlying cognitive process. However, current…
The diversity of patterns that emerge from complex systems motivates their use for scientific or artistic purposes. When exploring these systems, the challenges faced are the size of the parameter space and the strongly non-linear mapping…
There is increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence and its application to medicine. Perceptions are less well-known, notably amongst children and young people. 21 members of a Young Persons Advisory Group for research, recommend…
Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts. Yet, little is known about how social factors influence curiosity in group work. We argue that curiosity is evoked not only through individual, but also interpersonal…
In this article we present and discuss a didactic activity that combines epistemic aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and a simple, relatively low-cost experiment on electromagnetic induction. The aim of the activity is for students to…
To maximize its success, an AGI typically needs to explore its initially unknown world. Is there an optimal way of doing so? Here we derive an affirmative answer for a broad class of environments.
The question "How did we get here and what will the future bring?" captures the human imagination and the attention of the National Academy of Science's Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Commitee (AASC). Fulfillment of this "fundamental…
When presented with information of any type, from music to language to mathematics, the human mind subconsciously arranges it into a network. A network puts pieces of information like musical notes, syllables or mathematical concepts into…
What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning? We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine learning and developmental robotics. We argue that…
Aversion to mathematics is a recognised and widespread problem. Following a review of the literature on this subject, this paper presents an education program which has been developed to test the hypothesis that transferring attention from…
Understanding infant development is one of the greatest scientific challenges of contemporary science. A large source of difficulty comes from the fact that the development of skills in infants results from the interactions of multiple…
The inflationary hot big bang model of cosmology explains the birth of the universe, the appearance of atoms and that of large-scale structures, altogether omitting any reference to the living world. Yet, like the physical world, the living…
Our world is strongly driven by technological developments that continuously create new markets and shape individual taste and choice. The scale of dissemination of the most recent technological breakthroughs and the capability of creating…
Two-minute science (2-minute science) is a science communication project initiated and supported by early-career Greek astrophysicists. With this endeavor, which started in December 2020, we try to bridge the gap between the scientific…
Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts, leading to creativity, and a love of learning. And while many school systems increasingly undercut curiosity by teaching to the test, teachers are increasingly interested in…
Astronomical phenomena are governed by processes on all spatial and temporal scales, ranging from days to the age of the Universe (13.8,Gyr) as well as from km size up to the size of the Universe. This enormous range in scales is contrived,…
Human consciousness has been a long-lasting mystery for centuries, while machine intelligence and consciousness is an arduous pursuit. Researchers have developed diverse theories for interpreting the consciousness phenomenon in human brains…
People sometimes worry about the Singularity [Vinge, 1993; Kurzweil, 2005], or about the world being taken over by artificially intelligent robots. I believe the risks of these are very small. However, few people recognize that we already…