Home

The Comirit Project is enhancing robotic and software systems with commonsense intelligence. We believe that the essential components of powerful commonsense-enabled systems have already been invented, but the unsolved challenge lies in combining and exploiting these inventions for their full potential.

Our objectives are short-term: we seek pragmatic approaches and aim to design systems that can be built in weeks or months, rather than decades. However, we remain inspired by the long term goals of creating systems that have deep human-like understanding of the real world, and therefore seek open-ended designs that can be gradually evolved into more capable systems.

Why Commonsense?

We believe that commonsense will be the fundamental driver behind the next generation of software applications, user interfaces and robots. Commonsense allows robots and software to truly understand the world and appropriately respond to unexpected situations rather than merely following brittle pre-defined rules that a programmer has had to laboriously develop.

Consider how commonsense can improve the role and effectiveness of technology:

• If your mother has just had a serious accident while you are watching a movie, commonsense is the difference between a mobile telephone network that silences all calls in the cinema and a phone network that realizes that sometimes inconvenience is appropriate.
• If you create a spreadsheet and accidentally multiply sales by the current date and a credit card number, commonsense is the difference between software that blindly performs the multiplication and software that offers a useful suggestion when it realizes the formula doesn't make any real-world sense.
• If dusty winds are blowing through an open door, commonsense is the difference between a robot that endlessly vacuums until the floor is clean and a robot that first pushes the door shut so that it is actually possible to get the floors clean.

Welcome

Welcome to the future of software development! While still in early days, we have already laid promising groundwork. Let the overview of our vision and technology whet your appetite, catch up on our latest publications, and if you want to ask questions, comment or participate then please feel free to get in contact.

Authored by Benjamin Johnston for the Comirit Project, 2010.