This report, the first of the project, presents original research evidence based on 1,516 face-to-face interviews with young Syrian international protection beneficiaries and applicants, 18-32 years old, which were conducted in the UK, Lebanon and Greece, between April and October 2017. Key findings from this comparative analysis inform our policy recommendations concerning the settlement, training and skills provision for young forced migrants in the UK. Key Findings: - Young Syrian refugees in the UK have the highest levels of skills and (...) training, and are most eager to remain and contribute to the host country, compared with those in Greece and Lebanon. - Young Syrian refugees are faced with higher levels of unemployment in the UK than citizens, while many of them who are in employment are doing jobs for which they are over-qualified. - Refugees in the UK receive better support and have an overall more positive experience and evaluation of actors compared to those in Greece and Lebanon, but access to key provisions designed to enhance labour market participation remains patchy. - Syrian refugees who have been resettled to the UK report overall more positive experiences than those coming through the asylum route, despite higher levels of employment among the latter and the government supposedly taking the more vulnerable among the former. - Young Syrians in Scotland are better supported, and more positive about their engagement with people and institutions, although they are currently more distanced from re-integration into the labour market compared to those settled in England. (shrink)

The broad range of capabilities exhibited by humans and animals is achieved through a large set of heterogeneous, tightly integrated cognitive mechanisms. To move artificial systems closer to such general-purpose intelligence we cannot avoid replicating some subset—quite possibly a substantial portion—of this large set. Progress in this direction requires that systems integration be taken more seriously as a fundamental research problem. In this paper I make the argument that intelligence must be studied holistically. I present key issues that must be (...) addressed in the area of integration and propose solutions for speeding up rate of progress towards more powerful, integrated A.I. systems, including (a) tools for building large, complex architectures, (b) a design methodology for building realtime A.I. systems and (c) methods for facilitating code sharing at the community level. (shrink)

A cognitive architecture aimed at cumulative learning must provide the necessary information and control structures to allow agents to learn incrementally and autonomously from their experience. This involves managing an agent's goals as well as continuously relating sensory information to these in its perception-cognition information processing stack. The more varied the environment of a learning agent is, the more general and flexible must be these mechanisms to handle a wider variety of relevant patterns, tasks, and goal structures. While many researchers (...) agree that information at different levels of abstraction likely differs in its makeup and structure and processing mechanisms, agreement on the particulars of such differences is not generally shared in the research community. A dual processing architecture has been proposed as a model of cognitive processing, and they are often considered as responsible for low- and high-level information, respectively. We posit that cognition is not binary in this way and that knowledge at any level of abstraction involves what we refer to as neurosymbolic information, meaning that data at both high and low levels must contain both symbolic and subsymbolic information. Further, we argue that the main differentiating factor between the processing of high and low levels of data abstraction can be largely attributed to the nature of the involved attention mechanisms. We describe the key arguments behind this view and review relevant evidence from the literature. (shrink)