Data, Structure, and Information in Artificial Intelligence

Dear Colleagues,

We live in a time when information has become visible, and its importance has become highly consequential. Timely information, and its veracity, can have a profound impact on the choice between life or death. Life is founded on information processes. All intelligence, natural or artificial, depends on information access, processing, and production. A basic feature of information processing is its dependence on structures. Physical, chemical, and biological systems use matter and energy to form a variety of structures for information processing, as well as other purposes.

Recent advances in our understanding of information processing structures are shaping the theory and practice of how we interact with each other and our environment. As many lectures in the recent is4si summit 2021 (IS4SI 2021) and the Conference – Theoretical and Foundational Problems (TFP) in Information Studies (tfpis.com) pointed out, structures play a very important role in how both living beings and digital systems convert information into knowledge and use it to develop cognitive capabilities. Our understanding of the following structures play key roles in these advances:

1. The genome and its ability to create autopoietic systems through information coding and managing of physical and chemical processes in nature;
2. The digital computing structures and their ability to model, monitor, and manage information processing and communication between us and our environment;
3. New mathematics of named sets, knowledge structures, cognizing agents, and structural machines, which provide a theoretical framework of unified information processing mechanisms going beyond symbolic computing and neural networks.

These advances allow us to expand our understanding of the evolution of sentient, resilient and intelligent systems in nature, technology, and society. They also enable the designing of a new class of digital automata with autopoietic behavior to enhance our current information processing systems with a higher degree of sentience, resilience, and intelligence at scale.

This Special Issue aims to bring together contributions from multiple disciplines dealing with information processing structures and their evolution, with the purpose to understand how intelligence is evolving in nature, as well as to design and build a new class of artificially intelligent machines that blend with human intelligence while providing privacy, security, local autonomy, and global ethics based on globally federated regulatory mechanisms.

We solicit high-quality papers that discuss the nature of information processing structures and their evolution to design next-generation digital automata that blend human and artificial consciousness and cultural mechanisms. This can include, but is not limited to, the topics listed below.

Prof. Dr. Rao Mikkilineni
Guest Editor

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