Luc Steels
Steels obtained a master's degree in Computer Science at MIT, specializing in AI under the supervision of Marvin Minsky and Carl Hewitt.
In 1980, he joined the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory in Ridgefield (US) to work on knowledge-based approaches to the interpretation of oil well logging data and became leader of the group who developed the Dipmeter Advisor which he transferred into industrial use while at Schlumberger Engineering, Clamart (Paris).
From 1985 a trend among AI researchers, including Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, William Clancey, Doug Lenat, John McDermott, Tom Mitchell, Bob Wielinga, a.o., arose to capture human expertise in more depth.
Steels played a significant role in establishing this new paradigm in the 1980s, organising a number of key workshops[11] and tutorials, helping to develop knowledge level design methodologies, particularly in collaboration with Bob Wielinga and the CommonKADS[12] approach developed at the University of Amsterdam, and publishing influential papers outlining the knowledge level approach.
[13] With his team at the AI Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, he developed various tools, most importantly the knowledge representation system KRS,[14] which was a frame-based object-oriented extension of LISP with facilities for truth maintenance,[15] meta-level inference and computational reflection.
[16] The team applied the approach for building challenging operational expert systems in various technical domains (electronic circuit design for digital telephone,[17] scheduling of Belgian railway traffic,[citation needed] monitoring of subway and diagnosis of nuclear power stations).
It all lead to the creation of a spin-off company Knowledge Technologies (with Kris Van Marcke as CEO) to further channel these developments into practical industrial use.
Around 1986, after an encounter with Ilya Prigogine from the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Steels opened in his VUB laboratory a second research line to develop a new paradigm for AI inspired by living systems.
[20] This new research line was at the confluence of several emerging trends happening in the late nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties: A revival of cybernetic reactive robots spearheaded by Rodney Brooks, the establishment of Artificial Life shaped as a new discipline by Chris Langton,[21] a renewed focus on emergent computation through self-organisation using cellular automata, models from chaos theory,[22] and genetic algorithms,[23] and the rise of multi-layered neural networks initiated by David Rumelhart and James McClelland.
[31] The experimental setup functioned for a decade as a framework for experiments in adaptive behavior, genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning by several generations of students at the VUB AI Lab with Andreas Birk taking the lead.
In 1995, after a visit to the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo at the invitation of Mario Tokoro, Steels opened a new chapter in his research endeavours, bringing the evolutionary thinking from Artificial Life and the advances in behavior-based robotics to bear on the question how it could be possible for a population of agents to autonomously self-organise an evolving adaptive language to communicate about the world as perceived through their sensory-motor apparatus.
A new team of collaborators was set up at the VUB AI lab and at the newly founded Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and worked for two decades (from 1995 to 2015) on this topic.
[37] The Language Game paradigm has been productive to study a wide range of issues in the emergence and evolution of language, first in theoretical work, with mathematical proofs that populations can indeed reach coherence (achieved in 2005 by Bart de Vylder and Karl Tuyls[38]) and with the discovery of scaling laws in relation to the growth of populations and the growth of possible topics (achieved in 2007 by Andrea Baronchelli and Vittorio Loreto[39]).
[64] Concretely, the EU project MUHAI[65] focuses on how the level of understanding in AI systems could be increased by building rich models of problem domains and problem situations and integrating a variety of knowledge sources (ontologies, language, vision and action, mental simulation, episodic memory and context models),[66] and the EU project VALAWAI focuses on how AI systems can be made 'value-aware' by introducing attention mechanisms to deal with highly complex, uncertain fragmented inputs, and a component implementing `moral intelligence'.
After a period of total focus on scientific work while in the United States, Luc Steels returned to artistic activities from the 1980s onwards.
[76] Within this artistic network Steels collaborated with several artists for the co-creation of new works, including with Carsten Holler (for the CapC Musee in Bordeaux and the Koelnerische Kunstverein); with Olafur Eliasson for a piece 'Look into the box' for the Musee d'art moderne in Paris in 2002[77] and later shown at the Festival dei 2 Mondi (Spoleto, 2003), the ExploraScience Museum (Tokyo, 2006), ), and other locations; with Sissel Tolaas for work shown at the Berlin Biennale;[78] with Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven at the NeuerAachenerKunstverein; and with Armin Linke and Giuliana Bruno for the New Alphabeth (Stop Making Sense) exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin);[79] Steels participated with his own installations in various art-science exhibitions, the most important ones being Laboratorium curated by H-U Obrist and B. Vanderlinden in Antwerp in 1999, and N01SE[80] in Cambridge (Kettle's Yard) and London (Wellcome Gallery) in 2000, curated by Adam Lowe[81] and Simon Schaffer.
[89] Most of these performances were conducted by Kris Stroobants with the Frascati Symphonic Orchestra, the choir La Folia, and various solists, including Reinoud van Mechelen and Pablo Lopez Martin (Mallorca opera).
The operas are written in a neo-classical, post modern musical style and elaborate societal and trans-humanistic issues raised by the use of Artificial Intelligence, including the occurrence of a singularity and the possibility of immortality through virtual agents.
Luc Steels curated a number of international exhibitions, including Intensive Science at La Maison Rouge in Paris (in 2006 and 2008), artes@ijcai at the Centro Borges in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 2015[90] and the 'Aqua Granda.
