[FRIAM] EpiRob 2009: call for paper (deadline 8 June 2009)
-- Apologies if you receive this announcement more than once Please distribute as appropriate -- thanks! -- CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS EpiRob 2009 NINTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EPIGENETIC ROBOTICS: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli Venice, Italy, November 12-14, 2009 http://www.epigenetic-robotics.org ** Submission Deadline: June 8, 2009 ** Epigenetic systems, whether natural or artificial, share a prolonged developmental process through which varied and complex cognitive and perceptual structures emerge as a result of the interaction of an embodied system with a physical and social environment. Epigenetic robotics has the twofold goal of understanding biological systems by the interdisciplinary integration between social/life and engineering sciences and, simultaneously, that of enabling robots and other artificial systems to autonomously develop skills for any particular environment (instead of programming them to solve particular goals for a specific environment). Interdisciplinary theory and empirical evidence are used to inform epigenetic robotic models, and these models can be used as theoretical tools to make experimental predictions in developmental psychology and other disciplines studying cognitive development in living systems. This year's edition of Epigenetic Robotics will have a special focus on emotional and social development, particularly addressed by keynote speakers and special discussion and working groups. However, submissions are welcome regarding all aspects of the study of cognitive development. Submissions are welcome regarding all aspects of the study of cognitive development, including (but not limited to): - The roles of and interactions among motivation, emotion, and value systems in development - The development of emotional competencies and systems - The development of social skills, such as imitation, synchrony processing, intersubjectivity, joint attention, intentionality, non-verbal and verbal communication, sensorimotor schemata, shared meaning and symbolic reference, social learning, social relationships, social cognition (mind reading, theory of mind) - The role of play in emotional, social, and cognitive development - The development of verbal and non-verbal communication - Links between (the development of) expression and communication - Architectures for autonomous development - Dynamical systems models of emotional, social, and cognitive development - The scope and limits of maturation, the mechanisms of open-ended development - The mechanisms of stage formation and stage transitions - Interaction between innate structure, ongoing developing structure, and experience - The interplay between embodiment, learning biases and environment - Algorithms for self-supervision, autonomous exploration, representation making, and methods for evolving new representations during ontogeny - Philosophical and social issues of development - The epistemological foundations of using robots to study development - The use of robots as theoretical tools (e.g., to make predictions) in the study of development in biological systems - The use of robots in applied settings (e.g., autism therapy) to study development in biological systems Robots that can undergo morphological changes and how they can be used to study interplays among social, emotional, cognitive and morphological development SUBMISSION INFORMATION: - EpiRob09 will accept submissions in two categories: long papers (presenting more mature research ideas and results) or short abstracts (presenting more preliminary / ongoing work). Manuscripts submitted as long papers should have a maximum length of 8 pages using the usual EpiRob format (former SAB template modified for A4 paper). Manuscripts submitted as abstracts should have a maximum length of 2 pages using the usual EpiRob format. The style files for LaTex are available in zip format and in tar format on the EpiRob'09 website, where you can also find a Word style file. All submissions must be in PDF format. Accepted long papers will have oral presentations at the conference. Accepted abstracts will be presented as posters. Authors of accepted abstracts will also have the opportunity to make a brief oral presentation during a Poster Spotlight session. All submissions and camera-ready papers and abstracts should be sent as email attachments in PDF format (only) to: epiro...@epigenetic-robotics.org mailto:epiro...@epigenetic-robotics.org. IMPORTANT DATES: - June 8, 2009: Papers and abstracts submission deadline. July 20, 2009: Acceptance notification. September 8, 2009: Camera-ready versions of accepted papers
Re: [FRIAM] Introduction- Montgomery- Kyield
Mark, Welcome aboard!! What rich experience! For me, it was hard to appreciate Santa Fe's possibilities until I realized how SMALL it is. Much smaller, for instance, than Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Once I factored in its size, I came to realize how extraordinary is its energy. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://cusf.viviti.com - Original Message - From: Mark Montgomery To: Friam Friam;topics issues Sent: 5/26/2009 10:49:15 AM Subject: [FRIAM] Introduction- Montgomery- Kyield Hi folks, I may have met some of you in person-- sorry for any redundancy. This may be more information than you seek in an introduction, but it's the minimum I can share I am a very experienced entrepreneur, consultant, and founder of Kyield - www.kyield.com . My wife and I moved to Santa Fe from Half Moon Bay, CA early this year. We enjoy living here- mountain and high desert lovers, but I am less optimistic about the business climate in my interests- primarily due to culture. Originally from Seattle area, I was engaged with my own business in the very early 1980s when I became deeply involved with the 'team Washington' strategy and ensuing effort, which was a very successful private/public sector effort. Seattle was still fairly depressed after the Boeing bust in the 70s just to get hammered by the deep recession of 1980. It was a dynamic time and place- at the time quite a small market- that resulted in quite a few global successes. I was directly involved with a couple and indirectly involved with most in that it was a small community. I learned a great deal, including that quite a number of essential ingredients need to come together in order to compete with the entrenched in the global economy, without which it rarely occurs. By compete I mean building globally competitive companies. My consulting firm/work took me to the SW near the peak of the SL crisis. I performed marketing audits on most communities in the SW for investors, bankruptcies, turn around plans, acquisitions, etc. We were ready for a change and decided to move to Scottsdale and then a couple years later up to a mini ranch near Prescott. We were publishing self guided management systems for remote small businesses as part of our consulting firm when the commercialization of the Internet occurred. We were toying with software at the time- business planning, execution, etc. - a few years before they became common, so I decided to experiment on the Web. Virtual Franchise was our first effort- highly evolutionary, the effort quickly turned into I think the first personalized small business network- offering learning, applications, social networking, consulting, and e-commerce sales. The subscription service was among the most successful in the 1995/96 time frame. Our growth rate was huge- the quality of members outstanding- some business modeling issues were still challenging- for example fraud was still a big problem then for online vendors, but so too were the costs to grow, so I started searching for venture capital. I found no one in the SW in VC working at our level, and most in SV who were would be considered competitors- if not already, they soon would be - the pattern then for e-commerce was to copy globally and fund locally. Still is to some degree. One of our biggest challenges was with local vendors at the time- they weren't nearly flexible enough for the demands of the medium, or fast enough to adapt-or honest enough to work with me, so I decided to jump in totally myself, bringing all of the technical services in-house, training in networking and programming myself. The result was one of the first in-house e-commerce incubators, although we didn't use the name incubator- and it shouldn't be confused with most that use the name. Our effort was more like a small idealab, or an internal incubator for a corporation. We worked with some clients on a virtual basis, but we weren't in the real estate business. So for several years we worked (mainly me and one other partner with remote teams of contractors) very hard on the many issues facing viable and sustainable Web businesses, with every increasing technical sophistication. We produced the first shop the web campaign and portal, and a global learning network for thought leaders- all top universities- agencies- corps were members, attracting a very strong membership- probably the world leading effort, with multiple firsts in software applications. Our Kyield effort has roots in the latter. I was a pioneer of sorts in e-commerce, also KM and Semantic Web, although frankly both terms have been abused in the minds of many enterprise customers, and so I tend to be the messenger of bad news lately, delivering tough love if anything. At the time Google was being hatched, for example, I was
Re: [FRIAM] Distributed Agents and Alan Kay's Universal Interface Language
On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Carl Tollander c...@plektyx.com wrote: What was the client's problem again? Darned if I can tell, this Universal Interface Language seems to have no document attached to it. The video from OOPSLA, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521, seems pretty incoherent to me. The video introduces meta-programming at minute 50 of 64, but the only positive example there is The Art of the MetaObject Protocol which he admits is incomprehensible unless you're already a CLOS expert. And we all know how the CLOS MetaObject protocol has taken the world by storm in the last 12 years. I really liked the observation that the velocity of proteins in cells, expressed in protein diameters, becomes 4x the speed of light when scaled to Volkswagens in Volkswagen diameters. Thermal motion in cells is violent. For all my molecular dynamics simulations, I never thought of what was going on quite like that. I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- rec -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Distributed Agents and Alan Kay's Universal Interface Language
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 01:32:01PM -0600, Roger Critchlow wrote: I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- rec -- Is that a bit like?: If God invented marathons to keep people from doing anything more stupid, the triathlon must have taken Him completely by surprise. P. Z. Pearce -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Distributed Agents and Alan Kay's UniversalInterface Language
It might be, but it might also mean that God invented (or Darwin if you prefer) two legs so that the triathlon could follow the marathon, if for no other reason than for our amusement- more probably to counter insecurities of humans with something left to be done. I can think of quite a few things in computing that are far more stupid than a participating in a marathon, like having to ask permission of the competition to exist. Running long distances seems brilliant in comparison. AK makes some good points in that speech, however, if you look passed the oop-la, particularly with respect to systems design. I came to some similar conclusions apparently about the same time period- '97 or so- that a holistic design would be necessary. Ironically, I have in the past year started to question whether Sem Web is pink? It doesn't seem to have some of the characteristics that would reflect blue, particularly since it must be written over pink so stretched that the pigment is barely discernable, and is constantly threatening to tear, whether it appears to work or not. .02-MM - Original Message - From: russell standish r.stand...@unsw.edu.au To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 4:09 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Distributed Agents and Alan Kay's UniversalInterface Language On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 01:32:01PM -0600, Roger Critchlow wrote: I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- rec -- Is that a bit like?: If God invented marathons to keep people from doing anything more stupid, the triathlon must have taken Him completely by surprise. P. Z. Pearce -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
