Update:
Some of the confirmed posters have been included on the website.
Update: Official Schedule posted here.
Update
: Poster available for download.
(updated) Please print it off and put it up!
Update
: All Five speakers have been
confirmed !
Workshop Overview
Understanding how world knowledge
can be grounded in sensori-motor
experience has been a long-standing goal of philosophy, psychology, and
artificial intelligence. So far this goal has remained distant, but
recent progress in machine learning, cognitive science, neuroscience,
engineering, and other fields seems to bring nearer the possibility of
addressing it productively.
The objective of this workshop is
to provide cross-fertilization of
ideas between diverse research communities interested in this subject. This
workshop will serve as a meeting point for researchers from these
various disciplines to share their perspectives and insights on the
issue of representing knowledge in terms of sensori-motor experience.
The
workshop will focus on research topics such as:
- The role of
prediction in biological and neurological systems
- Identifying
relevant sensory information, both across sensors and time (sensor
bootstrapping)
- Representations spanning
multiple spatio-temporal scales
- Signals to
symbols, symbol grounding
- General issues of
grounded knowledge representations: formats, capabilities, affordances,
and limitations
- Reasoning and planning
in terms of grounded knowledge
- Active perception guided
by sensory-motor experience
- Construction of
perceptual or motor control primitives
- Grounded state
representations (PSRs, OOMs, etc)
- Dynamical /
environmental models grounded in sensory-motor experience
- Learning
algorithms for intelligent agents
- Learning in infants,
going from
sensory data to representations
The workshop will be comprised of invited talks by 5-6 of the top
people from a variety of disciplines related to experience based
knowledge representations. The speakers will share their area-specific
knowledge and understanding of these issues with the workshop
attendees. Several discussion sessions will give an opportunity for all
workshop participants to discuss ideas. The workshop will conclude with
a poster session populated
with work submitted by the community at large.
A central goal is to bring
together the perspectives of different communities. We invite
participants from any area, including machine
learning, cognitive science, computational neuroscience, developmental
robotics, and philosophy.
Confirmed
Speakers
Richard S. Sutton is professor and iCORE chair of computing science at
the University of Alberta. He is a fellow of the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of the textbook
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction from MIT Press. Before joining
the University of Alberta in 2003, he worked in industry at AT&T
and GTE Labs, and in academia at the University of Massachusetts. He
received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts
in 1984 and a BA in psychology from Stanford University in 1978.
Rich's research interests center on the learning problems facing a
decision-maker interacting with its environment, which he sees as
central to artificial intelligence. He is also interested in
animal learning psychology, in connectionist networks, and generally in
systems that continually improve their representations and models of
the world. Attached Documents
Deb Roy is an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he heads the Media Lab's
Cognitive Machines research group. In 2003 he was appointed AT&T
Career Development Professor. Roy has published over 50 peer-reviewed
papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling,
data mining, robotics, and human-machine interface design. He has
served as guest editor for the journal Artificial Intelligence, and as
an associate of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Roy
collaborates closely with industry in the areas of data visualization,
data mining, and the design of human-machine collaborative systems. He
holds a BASc in computer engineering from University of Waterloo,
Canada, and MS and PhD degrees in media arts and sciences from MIT.
Mark H. Bickhard received his B.S. in Mathematics, M.S. in Statistics,
and Ph. D. in Human Development, all from the University of
Chicago. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin for
eighteen years before joining Lehigh University in 1990 as Henry R.
Luce Professor in Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of
Knowledge. He is affiliated with the Departments of Psychology,
Philosophy, Biology, Counseling, and Computer Science, and is Director
of the Institute for Interactivist Studies and of the Complex Systems
Research Group. He was Director of Cognitive Science from 1992
thru 2003. His work focuses on the nature and development of
persons, as biological, psychological, and social beings. This
work has generated an integrated organization of models encompassing
the whole person, ranging from the nature of biological function
through perception, cognition, processes of and constraints on
development, rationality, emotions, reflexive consciousness, language,
psychopathology, and the relationships between the emergence of social
reality and the social ontology of persons.
Rajesh Rao is an associate professor in the Computer Science and
Engineering department at the University of Washington, where he heads
the Laboratory for Neural Systems. He received his PhD from the
University of Rochester and was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies before joining the University of
Washington. His research spans the areas of computational neuroscience,
humanoid robotics, and brain-computer interfaces. He is the recipient
of a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship
for junior faculty, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and an NSF Career
award. He is the co-editor of two books: Probabilistic Models of the
Brain (2002) and Bayesian Brain (2007).
Bernard Balleine is Professor in the Department of Psychology and
Associate Director of the Brain Research Institute, UCLA.
He received his BA from the University of Sydney, Australia and his PhD
from the University of Cambridge, UK where he was subsequently elected
a Research Fellow of Jesus College. His research focuses on the
motivational, cognitive and neural determinants of goal-directed action
as a part of the larger goal of establishing the fundamental
distinctions between reflexive, volitional and habitual actions. Attached Documents
Call for Participation
Participation in the form of a
poster will be by invitation from the
program committee based on a small written submission, either a short
paper or extended abstract on your relevant work (this may be work that
has been previously
published elsewhere).
We encourage submissions from all
disciplines that are related to the topic of the workshop. The
poster session is expected to reflect that wide variety of interesting
ideas surrounding our topic.
- Submission Deadline: November 12, 2006 (EXTENDED)
- Acceptance Notification: November 10, 2006
- Workshop date: December 8, 2006
Agenda and Venue
This will be a one-day workshop held on December 8, 2006 in Whistler, British
Columbia, Canada as part of the NIPS
conference.
Agenda
can be downloaded here.
Organizers / Contact Information
Related Past Events
This workshop is in the same
spirit as recent workshops including:
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