Curiosity Styles in the Natural and Artificial Wild

This seminar explores the concept of curiosity styles across natural and artificial intelligence. Delve into a multidisciplinary examination of how curiosity has been practiced over two millennia and continues to manifest today. Learn about a historico-philosophical approach to cataloging curiosity styles and see how these patterns emerge when humans browse Wikipedia. Understand how psychological and mechanical theories of curiosity can be formalized using network science mathematics, enabling explicit testing in human behavioral data and investigation of mental affordances. Discover how artificial agents can be trained through reinforcement learning to develop human-like curiosity styles. Examine findings from a study of millions of Wikipedia users that reveals how curiosity styles differ globally and correlate with factors of social inequality. The presentation challenges the traditional acquisitional view of curiosity, instead proposing that curiosity manifests as unique styles of network building that vary across individuals.