Connectionists: Extended Call for Participation : NIPS Workshop on Grounding Perception, Knowledge and Cognition in Sensori-Motor Experience

[Brian Tanner]

UPDATES: The organizers of the workshop have extended the deadline  
for poster submission until Sunday, November 12th, 2006.  We have  
also confirmed all five invited speakers.


Call for Participation
======================
NIPS 2006 Workshop on Grounding Perception, Knowledge and Cognition  
in Sensori-Motor Experience

Whistler Resort & Spa and the Whistler Hilton Resort & Spa, BC, CANADA

http://rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/prw2006.html

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
-------------------------------------

Dr. Richard Sutton

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.

Dr. Deb Roy

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.

Dr. Mark H. Bickhard

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.

Dr. Rajesh Rao

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).

Dr. Bernard Balleine

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.

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 the  
wide variety of interesting ideas surrounding our topic.

     * Submission Deadline: November 12, 2006   <-- *UPDATED*
     * Acceptance Notification: November 10, 2006  <-- Notification  
stands for already existing submissions.  New submitters will be  
notified ASAP.
     * Workshop date: December 8, 2006

All submissions should be emailed to grounded.workshop at gmail.com


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.  The  
schedule can be found on the workshop website.

Organizers / Contact Information
-------------------------------------

     * Brian Tanner (University of Alberta) Co-Chair
     * Michael James (Toyota Research) Co-Chair
     * David Wingate (University of Michigan) Co-Chair
     * Satinder Singh (University of Michigan)
     * Rich Sutton (University of Alberta)

Please direct all questions and submissions to  
grounded.workshop at gmail.com

The official workshop website is: http://rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/ 
prw2006.html

Related Past Events
This workshop is in the same spirit as recent workshops including:

     * 2006 Barbados workshop Predictive State Representations
     * 2005 Barbados workshop Predictive State Representations
     * 2004 ICML Workshop Predictive Representations of World Knowledge
     * 2001 AAAI Spring Symposium Learning Grounded Representations