Individual and Collective Autonomous Development

TL;DR

This paper presents a vision for autonomous development in ICT systems, emphasizing the importance of systems that can learn, adapt, and act collectively in complex, unpredictable environments without prior knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of autonomous development in ICT, framing its key ideas, application domains, and outlining research challenges for realizing such systems.

Findings

Identifies key concepts of autonomous development.

Highlights application domains for autonomous ICT systems.

Outlines research challenges in autonomous development.

Abstract

The increasing complexity and unpredictability of many ICT scenarios let us envision that future systems will have to dynamically learn how to act and adapt to face evolving situations with little or no a priori knowledge, both at the level of individual components and at the collective level. In other words, such systems should become able to autonomously develop models of themselves and of their environment. Autonomous development includes: learning models of own capabilities; learning how to act purposefully towards the achievement of specific goals; and learning how to act collectively, i.e., accounting for the presence of others. In this paper, we introduce the vision of autonomous development in ICT systems, by framing its key concepts and by illustrating suitable application domains. Then, we overview the many research areas that are contributing or can potentially contribute to the realization of the vision, and identify some key research challenges.