Announcement

Mike Brady and I are announcing the formation of the COG-X - Robot-X reading and discussion group.

Because of the exciting things going on with robotics at IUB at the moment with the opening of the Robotics lab and the hiring of Randall Beer, we thought that it makes sense that Cog-X should be geared at robotics topics this semester.

Therefore Mike Brady and I thought it a great idea to merge the casual robotics discussion group with the Cog-X reading and discussion group for the time being. At least in the last year the readings in COG-X have often been of a rather theoretical/philosophical nature. The robotics discussions have so far tended to be about modeling and math, but there is plenty of room for more theoretical and philosophical papers and discussions if there is enough interest.

The next robotics discussion group was planned to be on Monday, Oct 2 at 7:30pm in the Cog Sci seminar room, Eigenman 821. Hence this will be the inaugural meeting of Cog-X/Robot-X, and we will have the usual Cog-X PIZZA!! Cog-X has normally met Wed evenings, but for several people in the robotics reading group that evening doesn't work that well. So the meeting on Monday will at the same time be an organizational meeting to figure out where and when to go next.

Ceyhun Sunsay (post doc in neuroscience) will be leading discussion on information processing and a model of automatic memory in animal behavior. Please scroll down to find the reading.

My contact details:
Karola Stotz, Post doc, Cognitive Science Program, IUB, Eigenmann 810
office x 66397, cell 606-2722, kstotz@indiana.edu

Topics

There was a mixture of opinions with respect to the format of cog-X. Although some people preferred to have it just as a venue for talks, I think that this is copying the Cog-lunch format too much (even though the latter is actually more a Psychology lunch). So I would suggest that we are starting Cog-X primarily as a reading group, but stay open for volunteered presentations, especially by students, but also by faculty if interest is there.

There was an extensive list of topics mentioned, with hardly any overlap between people:

Evolution of behavior
Heuristics, decision theory
Android science
Cognitive development
Foundations of Cog Sci
Philosophy of Cog Sci
Philosophy of psychology
Mental content
Complex systems
Evolutionary systems (Artificial life, systems biology)
Embodied cognition
Natural language processing
Language acquisition
Integration of different explanatory levels in Cog Sci
Animal behavior

Readings

April 30

Chadderdon, George (Forthcoming). Assessing Machine Volition: An Ordinal Scale for Rating Artificial and Natural Systems. Adaptive Behavior.

Supplementary material.

March 5

Panksepp, Jaak (1982). Toward a general psychobiological theory of emotions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5: 407-467.

February 19

C. Breazeal, G. Hoffman, and A. Lockerd. "Teaching and working with robots as a collaboration." In Proceedings of Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 1030-1037, New York, NY, 2004.

A. L. Thomaz, G. Hoffman, and C. Breazeal. "Reinforcement Learning with Human Teachers: Understanding how people want to teach robots." In Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2006.

February 5

The first is a general overview over the robot architecture we are developing and includes a summary of some experimental results, an evaluation of its performance at the AAAI robot competition in 2005, and a comparison to other robotic architectures:

Scheutz, M., Schermerhorn, P., Kramer, J. and Anderson, D. (2007) "First Steps toward Natural Human-Like HRI". Autonomous Robots (forthcoming)

The other paper is on multi-agent simulations, namely a study on using artificial emotions to control behavior in a multi-agent system where agents need to find resources to survive:

Scheutz, M. (2004) "Useful Roles of Emotions in Artificial Agents: A Case Study from Artificial Life". Proceedings of AAAI 2004, AAAI Press, 42-47.

Previous Readings

Fall 2006

Steinhage, Axel and Georg Schöner (1997) Self-calibration based on invariant view recognition: Dynamic approach to navigation. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 20: 133-156

Steinhage, Axel and Georg Schöner (1997) Self-calibration based on invariant view recognition: Dynamic approach to navigation. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 20: 133-156

Raju S. Bapi, V. S. Chandrasekhar Pammi, K. P. Miyapuram and Ahmed (2005) "Investigation of sequence processing: A cognitive and computational neuroscience perspective". Current Science 89 (10): 1690-1698

Georgopoulos, A. P., Lurito, J. T., Petrides, M. and Schwartz, A. B. (1989) Mental rotation of the neuronal population vector. Science 243, 234-236.

Tanji, J. and Shima, K. (1994) Role for supplementary motor area cells in planning several movements ahead. Nature 371, 413-416

Doya, K. (1999) What are the computations in the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and the cerebral cortex. Neural Networks 12, 961- 974.

Wagner, Allen R. SOP: A Model of Automatic Memory Processing in Animal Behavior.

Spring 2006

Chandrasekharan, Sanjey and Stewart, Terrance C. (Submitted) 'The Origin of Epistemic Structures and Proto-representations'.

Robert Rupert, 2006, Extended and Embedded Cognition: Reining in the Radical Theses. Draft, University of Colorado, Boulder, 3/26/06.

Mandik, Pete (2003) Varieties of Representation in Evolved and Embodied Neural Networks. Biology and Philosophy 18: 95-130

Wheeler, M. (2005). Friends Reunited? Evolutionary Robotics and Representational Explanation. Artificial Life. 11 (1-2): 215-232

2005 Fall

Marcus, G. F., S. Vijayan, S. Bandi Rao, P. M. Vishton. 1999. Rule learning by seven-month old infants. Science 283, 77-80. -
Annotation: the most successful demonstration of infants learning and generalizing abstract patterns, using artificial grammar learning

Aslin, R. N., J. R. Saffran, and E. L. Newport. 1998. Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological science, 9, 321-4. -
Annotation: Demonstrating that infants can segment a novel speech stream based only on transitional probabilities.

Saffran, J.R., R. N. Aslin, and E. L. Newport. 1996. Statisitical learning by 8-months old infants. Science 274, pp 1926-28.
Annotation: this paper started the debate.

Ceri Savage,1 Elena Lieven,1,2 Anna Theakston1 and Michael Tomasello. 2003. Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. Developmental Science 6:5 pp 557-567

Hudson Cam, C. L., and E. L. Newport. 2005. Regularizing unpredictable variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language learning and development, 1, 151-95. -
Annotation: a fascinating artificial grammar learning study showing that adults display frequency matching while children regularize.

Externalism and the Problem of Intentionality (Rob Wilson)
Following on from Boundaries of the Mind [Cambridge University Press, 2004; http://www.cup.org/titles/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521544947, in the first half of 2005 I started on a series of papers on externalism, particular the radical form that it takes as locational externalism or the extended mind thesis. Although there is some discussion of the classic problem of intentionality tucked into one or two of these still in progress papers, I think there is room for stand-alone treatment of the problem. Here's the idea. Since the now classic recent discussions of the problem of intentionality were developed presupposing either individualism or weak forms of externalism (what I call "taxonomic externalism"), what does the problem look like when we take stronger forms of externalism, such as Clark and Chalmers's extended mind thesis seriously? Can the problem still be articulated? If so, can it be solved more satisfactorily than in the past? My "Meaning Making and the Mind of the Externalist", in Richard Menary (editor), Externalism (Ashgate, in press), and "How to Situate Cognition: Letting Nature Take its Course" (with Andy Clark) in Murat Aydede and Philip Robbins (editors), Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (in progress), are starts on this general project.

Wilson, Robert (In press) "Meaning Making and the Mind of the Externalist". In: Externalism. Richard Menary (ed), Ashgate, in press.

Wilson, Robert and Andy Clark (in progress) "How to Situate Cognition: Letting Nature Take its Course", in Murat Aydede and Philip Robbins (ed), Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (in progress),

Zlatev, Jordan (2001) The epigenesis of meaning in human beings, and possibly in robots. Minds and Machines 11 (2), 155-195.

Bringsfjord, Selmer (2004) On Building Robot Persons: Response to Zlatev. Minds and Machines 14: 381-385,

Rocha, Luis M. and Wim Hordijk (2005) "Material Representations: From the Genetic Code to the Evolution of Cellular Automata". Artificial Life, in press

Rocha, Luis M. [2001]."Evolution with material symbol systems". Biosystems. Vol. 60: 95-121.

Rocha, Luis M. [2000]. "Syntactic autonomy, cellular automata, and RNA editing: or why self-organization needs symbols to evolve and how it might evolve them". In: Closure: Emergent Organizations and Their Dynamics. Chandler J.L.R. and G, Van de Vijver (Eds.) Annals of the NewYork Academy of Sciences. Vol. 901: 207-223.

Bickhard, M. H. (2004). The Dynamic Emergence of Representation. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, P. Slezak (Eds.) Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Praeger.

This page is maintained by Karola Stotz.