MIR Labs Objectives

The main objectives of Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs) are as follows.

• To initiate new innovative research directions by networking together the critical mass of resources
• To strengthen scientific and technological excellence on a particular research area, which is important to a particular geographical region / area / country etc.
• To integrate the various research efforts of the scientific team to be a source of innovation on possible scientific, technological and socio-economic trajectories to mould the future of Machine Intelligence
• To promote and sponsor scientific activities (conferences and workshops) in developing and under represented countries by offering mentoring, technical assistance etc.

What is Machine Intelligence?

The idea of Machine Intelligence refers back to 1936, when Alan Turing proposed the idea of universal mathematics machine, a theoretical concept in the mathematical theory of computability. In the MIR Labs framework, machine intelligence refers to building adaptive intelligence in a network of machines (Network Intelligence) to solve a problem.

Last few decades have seen a new era of computational intelligence focusing on the principles, theoretical aspects, and design methodology of algorithms gleaned from nature and biology. Examples are artificial neural networks inspired by mammalian neural systems, evolutionary computation inspired by natural selection in biology, simulated annealing inspired by thermodynamics principles and swarm intelligence inspired by collective behavior of insects or micro-organisms etc. interacting locally with their environment causing coherent functional global patterns to emerge. These techniques have found their way in solving some real world problems in science, business, technology and commerce. In spite of the evolution of current techniques, sometimes we realize that the so-called computational intelligence is sometimes very artificial in nature. It can be argued with some conviction that a computationally intelligent algorithm that cannot solve new problems in new ways is emphasizing the artificial and not intelligence.

Defining machine intelligence is not an easy task. It is a consortium of various technologies involving non-linear dynamics, computational intelligence, ideas from physics, physcology and several other computational frameworks as illustrated below.

Why MIR Labs?

We are blessed with sophisticated technological artifacts that are enriching our daily lives and the society. It is believed that the future Internet is going to provide us the framework to integrate, control or operate virtually any device, appliance, monitoring systems, infrastructures etc. An Internet enabled cyber-ecosystem is not far away. Such a complex system has to be autonomous and able to continuously adapt, providing the required quality of service levels according to different service level agreements, without requiring the need of much human intervention.

This is an interesting problem. The challenge is to design intelligent machines and networks that could communicate and adapt according to critic or error information, self organize and resilient in case of a system, service or component failure due to natural cause or a malicious attack. Currently a lot of focused research works is going in different areas and most of these results are confined to the institutions and laboratories. We believe that an academic initiative is required to integrate the various research efforts to build complex intelligent machines and networks that can tackle our complex problems of the future.