Do Artificial Intelligence Systems Understand?

Are intelligent machines really intelligent? Is the underlying philosophical concept of intelligence satisfactory for describing how the present systems work? Is understanding a necessary and sufficient condition for intelligence? If a machine could understand, should we attribute subjectivity to it? This paper addresses the problem of deciding whether the so-called "intelligent machines" are capable of understanding, instead of merely processing signs. It deals with the relationship between syntaxis and semantics. The main thesis concerns the inevitability of semantics for any discussion about the possibility of building conscious machines, condensed into the following two tenets: "If a machine is capable of understanding (in the strong sense), then it must be capable of combining rules and intuitions"; "If semantics cannot be reduced to syntaxis, then a machine cannot understand." Our conclusion states that it is not necessary to attribute understanding to a machine in order to explain its exhibited "intelligent" behavior; a merely syntactic and mechanistic approach to intelligence as a task-solving tool suffices to justify the range of operations that it can display in the current state of technological development.

Bayesian nonparametric comorbidity analysis of psychiatric disorders

The analysis of comorbidity is an open and complex research field in the branch of psychiatry, where clinical experience and several studies suggest that the relation among the psychiatric disorders may have etiological and treatment implications. In this paper, we are interested in applying latent feature modeling to find the latent structure behind the psychiatric disorders that can help to examine and explain the relationships among them. To this end, we use the large amount of information collected in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) database and propose to model these data using a nonparametric latent model based on the Indian Buffet Process (IBP). Due to the discrete nature of the data, we first need to adapt the observation model for discrete random variables. We propose a generative model in which the observations are drawn from a multinomial-logit distribution given the IBP matrix. The implementation of an efficient Gibbs sampler is accomplished using the Laplace approximation, which allows integrating out the weighting factors of the multinomial-logit likelihood model. We also provide a variational inference algorithm for this model, which provides a complementary (and less expensive in terms of computational complexity) alternative to the Gibbs sampler allowing us to deal with a larger number of data. Finally, we use the model to analyze comorbidity among the psychiatric disorders diagnosed by experts from the NESARC database.