Individual and Collective Self-Development: Concepts and Challenges

The increasing complexity and unpredictability of many ICT scenarios will represent a major challenge for future intelligent systems. The capability to dynamically and autonomously adapt to evolving and novel situations, with a partial or limited knowledge of the domain, both at the level of individual components and at the collective level, will become a crucial need for smart devices acting in many application domains. In this paper, we envision future systems able to self-develop mental models of themselves and of the environment they act in. Key properties will include: learning models of own capabilities; learning how to act purposefully towards the achievement of specific goals; and learning how to act in the presence of others, i.e., at the collective level. In our work, we will introduce the vision of self-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 realisation of the vision, and identify some key research challenges.