Beyond spatial reasoning: Challenges for ecological problem solving

Abstract

This vision piece reflects upon virtues of early computer science due to scarcity and high cost of computational resources. It critically assesses divergences between realworld problems and their computational counterparts in commonsense problem solving. The paper points out the different objectives of commonsense versus scientific approaches to problem solving. It describes how natural cognitive systems exploit space and time without explicitly representing their properties and why purely computational approaches are less efficient than their natural role models, as they depend on explicit representations. We argue for investigating spatio-temporally integrated methods to spatial problem solving. We contrast these methods to sequential computational approaches that require digital twins of the environment and cannot make direct use of simultaneous spatio-temporal interactions. The paper concludes with predicting future developments in problem solving, praising the relative merits of different routes to be taken. It advocates the translation of fundamental cognitive principles into technical robotic solutions.

JOSIS' 10th anniversary special feature: part two

“…We open this editorial with the sad news that a member of our editorial board, Christian Freska, passed away this autumn. Christian was an active and supportive member of our editorial board, bringing his unique and longstanding expertise on spatial cognition to JOSIS, as represented by his contribution to the first part of our anniversary issue [7]. We will miss him.…”

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JOSIS' 10 th anniversary special feature: part twoWe open this editorial with the sad news that a member of our editorial board, Christian Freska, passed away this autumn. Christian was an active and supportive member of our editorial board, bringing his unique and longstanding expertise on spatial cognition to JOSIS, as represented by his contribution to the first part of our anniversary issue [7]. We will miss him.The second part of our special tenth anniversary issue brings together nine more vision papers from members of our editorial board.

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JOSIS' 10th anniversary special feature

“…They address directly how we communicate through maps [8] and the importance of the categories we choose to reason with [3,4]. The computational tools we develop and apply are profoundly important, and linking these to cognition is essential [5]. New data sources such as geo-tagged social media can provide us with different ways of exploring such cognition in a bottom up way [10] and perhaps contribute to more nuanced considerations of the ways in which the environment is represented [14].…”

“…Analytical approaches to deal with large volumes of data, which are increasingly generated by the crowd [2] or Internet of Things sensors, encompass geospatial artificial intelligence, machine learning [9,15] and visual analytics [1], and must communicate and consider uncertainties [7]. These have paved the way for more efficient decision support systems, for example in agriculture [13], and for solving ecological problems [5,14,3]. Analysing and influencing mobility, across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales is a crucial challenge if we are to create a sustainable, and not simply an optimised but profoundly unequal, future [16,12,11].…”