CSE Colloquium: Explore/Exploit in Human and AI Foraging and Creativity

Presenter: Chris Kello, Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced

Abstract:

Exploring the unknown and exploiting the known are central to natural and artificial intelligence. The duality manifests in many ways across domains and levels of analysis, but it has evolutionary roots in foraging and creativity. I will talk about a set of experiments and simulations on explore/exploit in human and social foraging, and creativity as expressed in words generated by humans versus language models. Results show ways that explore/exploit can be managed between perception, planning, and movement, as well as between individual and collective actions. Language models are found to be less exploratory and more exploitative than humans, although human/AI interaction may strike an explore/exploit balance in some cases.

Bio:

Dr. Kello earned his Ph.D in connectionist psycholinguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 1996, and he continued working on neural network models of language processing as a Postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University and Assistant Professor at George Mason University. Dr. Kello served as Director of NSF’s Perception, Action, and Cognition program before joining UC Merced in 2008. He has published over 140 articles across several areas of cognitive science and related disciplines.

Hosted by: Professor Daniel Fremont and Professor Leilani Gilpin

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95300285113?pwd=62tnEPUtRrsmbW7SHTavaRbaF2afSr.1