skip to context

Discover Artificial Intelligence

1. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your research background

My full name is Mustafa Okyay Kaynak, but I go by my middle name, simply Okyay. I am somewhat senior; this year I will celebrate the 50th anniversary of my doctoral degree. However, I would like to point out that I am an accidental professor. I had intended to complete my post graduate studies at the masters level but my supervisor turned my thesis down, requesting that I dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s and come back a year later for a Ph.D. degree! 

Over the past 50 years, I have managed to stay current, my research interests have evolved from motion control related areas to intelligent systems, then to cyber physical systems, finally to AI applications.             

In the past, I used to think that “Jack of all trades but master of none” is a degrading remark, more like what is obviously meant by the Chinese saying, “equipped with knives all over, yet none is sharp.” Now I have started to appreciate that interdisciplinarity (with the existence of a major discipline) is an asset.

2. What is Discover Artificial Intelligence about and what major developments will impact the journal’s area of research in your opinion?

The areas of research of the journal will be impacted by the closer and the tighter connections of the cyberspace with the physical space with human in the loop, made possible by the developments in 5G and 6G telecommunications.

There are many journals out in the market on Artificial Intelligence, some of them are very well established with high metrics. The material they publish is mostly on the applications of AI theory and methodologies. I would like to see Discover Artificial Intelligence publish more on national strategies, governance, and other topics to complement the existing literature and those that support and accelerate United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 9 “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure” by helping to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.

3. Why should researchers publish in Discover Artificial Intelligence? And what advice would you give them before submitting?

Discover Artificial Intelligence is an Open Access Journal with a streamlined submission process ensures a swift turnaround time to publish scholarly research rapidly while maintaining the highest peer-review standards. We ensure that the material we publish in the form of research, review, perspective, etc. articles are highly discoverable and instantly available globally to everyone.

We provide our contributors with an excellent support service at every stage to guide you through the whole submission, review, and publication process. I and the managing team are very reachable. I try to respond to every mail that I receive. I hope to be able to do so even when Discover Artificial Intelligence becomes a very popular journal with over a thousand submissions per year.

Finally, it is an established fact that OA articles do receive more citations than articles that are not easily accessable.

4. Delve about the importance of the subject you that you are writing about

It was about a week ago that Honda’s ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) officially went into retirement, ending its 20-year career. The work on its first version P1 started at as early as 1986. P2 was a monster at 210 kg, stood over 180 cm. Then came the version P3 and P4 (P stood for prototype) and finally came ASIMO with its “human-friendly” dimensions (52 kg, 120 cm). I still remember the days when I used to use the full-page advertisement that appeared in USA Today, depicting a typical US family, husband, wife, a boy and a girl, the family dog and an ASIMO!

Since its debut in 2000, ASIMO has become a symbol of Japan’s pioneering robot technology, mastering the abilities to run, hop on one leg, speak sign language using five fingers and pour coffee into a paper cup from a tumbler.

Honda, in September of last year, announced a plan to develop an avatar robot.

There already is much work on AI embodied robotics. The use of the word “avatar” by Honda makes me wonder whether the research will be concentrated on personal digital twins (PDTs) that have cognitive capabilities.

5. What (new) areas would open up for research as a result?

Let me first start with some general comments on new research areas: The erosion of the boundaries between different disciplines and the convergence between the disciplines will continue and new research areas will emerge from the edges. At this point in time, I would not want to name new research areas as what has been happening for the past two years has been affected by the pandemic, “virtual X” becoming the major game maker. Having stated this, I expect that the major paradigm shifts will be from internet of things to internet of behaviours and from connected things to connected intelligence and more and more towards human-systems integration. Cognitive and symbiotic systems will start paving the way to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Personally, mind you personally, I do not believe that we will ever reach Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) stage, leading to “singularity” as defined by Ray Kurzweil almost two decades ago.

The word robotics is recently being used in a different context. Consider hyperautomation which is an emerging area in the use of artificial intelligence that aims to simplify business processes. A major methodology in hyperautomation is the robotic process automation (RPA). However, it has nothing to do with robots per se. It simply means that a business process is automated like the working of a robot.

With regards to AI and Robotics, the research areas that are likely to become more popular are those that involve human looking robots with cognitive capabilities as personal digital twins (avatars) and also in prosthetics that put the human subject in the loop through BCI signals.


Mustafa Kaynak © SpringerProf. Okyay Kaynak received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Birmingham, U.K., in 1972. From 1972 to 1979, he held various positions in the industry. In 1979, he joined Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, where he is currently a Professor Emeritus, holding the UNESCO Chair on Mechatronics. He has held long-term (near to or more than a year) Visiting Professor/Scholar positions at various institutions in Japan, Germany, USA, Singapore, and China. His current research interests are in the fields of artificial intelligence and its applications. He presently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Discover Artificial Intelligence. He received the Chinese Government’s Friendship Award and Humboldt Research Prize (both in 2016). Most recently, in 2020, he was awarded the Academy Prize of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.