Ok, guys, Break out those crayons, or if you prefer - legos - and start working on those abstracts. SYMPOSIUM: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS AT AISB-00 -- The 2000 Convention of the AISB http://www.cogs.sussex.ac.uk/aisb Convention WEB site: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mgl/aisb/ 17-20 April 2000 University of Birmingham http://www.bham.ac.uk England A two day symposium at the AISB convention (partially sponsired by the AI professional group of IEE (www.iee.org.uk) is planned on: "HOW TO DESIGN A FUNCTIONING MIND" Plse see the symposium web page for up to date information: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/aisb2000 1. Summary: This two-day symposium will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to the long term problem of designing a human-like mind, whether for the scientific purpose of understand human minds or some engineering purpose. The invited plenary speakers for the AISB-00 Convention are Alan Bundy, Geoffrey Hinton, Marvin Minsky, and Aaron Sloman. It is expected that some of their talks will be relevant to this symposium. 2. Background to the symposium: Much research in AI is fragmented: people work on language, or vision, or planning, or learning or mathematical reasoning, without necessarily asking how their models could be combined with others in a fully functioning mind; or they discuss multi-agent systems where the agents have only very simple collections of capabilities. Much research in psychology is equally fragmented: investigating particular capabilities and how they are affected by environmental factors, or brain damage, or gender, or age, etc.; for instance linguistic or visual or problem solving or memory or motor control capabilities. Moreover such research often produces interesting empirical results without leading to a theory that is deep or precise enough to be the basis for a design for a working system. Some philosophers also think about these topics and attempt to analyse the concepts involved in talking about minds, or necessary or sufficient conditions for various kinds of mentality, but without doing so at a level that might guide an engineer attempting to design a mind: and some of them produce arguments claiming to show that the task is impossible, but without formulating the arguments in a manner that could convince a computer engineer. Ethologists study the minds of many kinds of animals and how they differ, but often without asking what sorts of architectural differences might underly the observed differences in behavioural capabilities, social structure, etc. Biologists and paleontologists study the evolution of systems which include humans and other animals but generally find it much easier to investigate the development of physical form and physical capabilities than the mechanisms of mind. 3. The purpose of the symposium The symposium is intended to bring together people interested in building bridges between various kinds of partial studies, with the long term goal of understanding, at least in principle, how to build a complete mind. Researchers in any discipline are invited to submit papers which address these issues, whether in a speculative fashion or by reporting firm results which directly contribute to the long term task. Examples of topics might be proposed include: architectures to accommodate multiple aspects of human mental functioning, or analyses of requirements for such architectures, or a critique of existing architectures on the basis of their functional limitations or inconsistent empirical evidence, or discussions of how important aspects of human minds might have evolved, or analysis of the problems of designing an adult mind vs designing an infant mind which develops into an adult mind, or comparisons between capabilities of different animals which provide evidence for architectural differences, or overviews of major results in neuroscience which have implications for the virtual machine architecture of a mind (e.g. evidence from brain-damaged patients indicating what sorts of separable functional modules exist). Philosophical papers presenting familiar arguments to prove that the task is impossible are not particularly welcome, whereas philosophical arguments which highlight some of the difficulties to be overcome are. 4. Structure of the symposium Depending on the number of acceptable papers submitted it is likely that the symposium will consist of four main half-day sessions followed by a concluding session. Each of the four main sessions will be composed of a set of half hour presentations of selected papers followed by a half hour (or longer) discussion period led by a member of the organising committee. The final session will be a discussion session aiming to identify achievements of the symposium and important unsolved problems which are worth addressing in the near future. It may be useful also to discuss future events of the same kind. It may prove desirable to shorten one of the half-day sessions to allow time for poster presentations. The possibility of an invited speaker with a longer presentation time is under consideration. 5. Submission and selection procedures Papers will be selected via a two stage process. (i) Short abstracts along with a short CV and contact information should be submitted to the program chair by Friday 3rd December, as described below. Some time in mid to late December, a set of abstracts will be selected as the basis for longer submissions in January, and authors informed. Then final papers will be selected from the longer submissions. Authors may submit papers to this symposium which overlap with their other publications. (i) SHORT ABSTRACTS: 3rd December. Format for submission of Short abstracts, to be emailed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] no later than 3rd December, NB: with "Subject:" line: AISB200 Symposium Abstract 1. Authors' names, affiliation, email addresses, phone number: (If there is more than one author the first author will be the corresponding author.) 2. A short CV for the main author or authors, including lists of recent journal or conference publications or invited talks, and current research activity. 3. Title of paper 4. Abstract: No more than 500 words. ONLY plain text submissions will be accepted at this stage, and only by email. Do NOT send MS-Word files. If possible, do not send mime-encoded attachments, which will add to the effort involved in processing the submissions. Do not send duplicate plain text and HTML messages. (ii) LONGER SUBMISSIONS Authors of selected abstracts will then be invited to submit longer papers (length to be specified later-probably 6 to 10 A4 pages, 12 point font), by the end of January. Only postscript or PDF submissions will be accepted at this stage. The committee will select a subset of the longer submissions (at most about 18) for presentation at the symposium, and possibly another subset for presentation as posters (if suitable facilities are available). The committee may decide to invite a number of contributors to present half length papers in shorter sessions. Authors will be notified in time to allow final hardcopy versions of papers to be submitted by 12th March for inclusion in the symposium proceedings. Symposium Chair Aaron Sloman, http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ School of Computer Science, http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/ The University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT, UK EMAIL [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organising committee for the symposium Graham Winstanley, [EMAIL PROTECTED], University of Brighton Brian Logan, B.S.Logan, University of Nottingham Yorick Wilks, [EMAIL PROTECTED], University of Sheffield John Fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED], Imperial Cancer Research Fund Noel Sharkey, [EMAIL PROTECTED], University of Sheffield Keith van Rijsbergen, [EMAIL PROTECTED], University of Glasgow Registration Registration procedures and costs will be announced via the main convention web page: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mgl/aisb/ INFORMATION ABOUT THE WHOLE CONVENTION: --------------------------------------- Programme Overseers and Local Arrangements Chairmen: John A. Barnden & Mark G. Lee School of Computer Science University of Birmingham England. {J.A.Barnden,M.G.Lee}@cs.bham.ac.uk http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~{jab,mgl} Work: (+44) (0)121 414-{3816,4765} Fax: (+44) (0)121 414-4281 NOTE: Please address all enquiries about the above symposium to the Programme Chair, NOT to Barnden or Lee. In particular, please do not send submissions to Barnden or Lee. Barnden and Lee welcome general enquiries about the Convention. Description: The Convention will largely consist of the Keynote Talks and about ten Symposia on a wide range of topics in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Underlying subthemes of the Convention will include but will not be restricted to: applications of AI to society; how AI can change society; how society affects individual cognition; how individual agents work together; society-of-agents views of individual cognition; and how agents deal with time and change outside and within themselves. Please see the Convention web page for descriptions of the individual Symposia. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mgl/aisb/ (To be finalised later) [23 Nov 1999] -- List Moderator: Len Maurer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> jcs-online is a service of the Journal of Consciousness Studies ************************************************************** MINDCONTROL-L Mind Control and Psyops Mailing List To unsubscribe or subscribe: send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text: "unsubscribe MINDCONTROL-L" or "subscribe MINDCONTROL-L". Post to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wes Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, list moderator
