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

[Brian Tanner]

NIPS 2006 Workshop on Grounding Perception, Knowledge and Cognition  
in Sensori-Motor Experience
======================================================
http://rlai.net/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
     * Grounded state representations (PSRs, OOMs, etc)
     * Dynamical / environmental models grounded in sensori-motor  
experience
     * Identifying relevant sensory information, both across sensors  
and time (sensor bootstrapping)
     * Representations spanning multiple spatio-temporal scales
     * Signals to symbols, symbol grounding
     * Issues of grounded knowledge representations: formats,  
capabilities, affordances,  limitations
     * Reasoning and planning in terms of grounded knowledge
     * Active perception guided by sensory-motor experience
     * Construction of perceptual or motor control primitives
     * 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.

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 Date: November 3, 2006
     * Acceptance Notification: November 10, 2006
     * Workshop date: December 8, 2006

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

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.net/RLAI/prw2006.html