Connectionists: International Workshop on what it means to communicate

[Stefan Wermter]

Call for Contributions and Papers

International Workshop on "What it means to communicate"

September 13, 2007
Ipanema Park Hotel, Porto, Portugal
Held in conjunction with International Conference on
Artificial Neural Networks’07


This workshop will focus on the neural, computational and cognitive
principles of communication. A wealth of new knowledge has been produced
by recent research for instance as part of the EU NEST initiative "What
it means to be human". The goal of this workshop is to explore relevant
research to focus on the question "what it means to communicate". The
general aim is to understand the neural, cognitive, social,
computational and developmental features that have led to communication
differences between humans and animals. A number of interesting and
successful research directions have been supported including learning by
imitation, examining the origin of human rule based reasoning, studying
the neural origins of language, exploring the evolutionary origins of
the human mind, researching into verbal and nonverbal communication,
using and interpreting signs, characterising human language by
structural complexity, and representing abstract concepts.

To complement this, the NESTCOM project aims to understand the results
of these projects and integrate them with a neural multimodal
understanding of verbal and visual communication for embodied action
understanding. This workshop will explore the characteristics of human
communication and their relationship to the role of neural networks in 
cognition and social development.

Topics of discussion could include:

· Neural or cognitive natural language modelling
· Neural or cognitive vision modelling
· Multimodal integration
· Bioinspired communicating robotics
· Developmental approaches to communication
· Imitation and Learning
· Signs and Gestures for communication
· Mirror neuron system and its mechanisms
· Learning mechanisms for communications skills
· Learning of action understanding
. Neural and artificial life agents
. Communication between robots
. Human robot interaction


The workshop will include invited introductory talks, about 10 short
presentations by panel members and a discussion session with the
workshop participants. We invite position statements of 1 page in length
or full papers of up to 8 pages in length for both panel members or
workshop participants, submitted as pdf file to
Stefan.Wermter AT sunderland.ac.uk and Michael.Knowles AT
sunderland.ac.uk by 30 June 2007. Speakers and panelists will
be confirmed shortly thereafter.

It is envisaged that extended paper versions of the contributions will
be published at a later date in a book by Springer and/or a special
issue e.g. in a journal like the Connection Science Journal.

For more and current information updates, program committee and
organisation we have set up a web page at
www.his.sunderland.ac.uk/nestcom/workshop/


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Professor Stefan Wermter

Centre for Hybrid Intelligent Systems

School of Computing and Technology

University of Sunderland

St Peters Way

Sunderland SR6 0DD

United Kingdom

phone: +44 191 515 3279

fax: +44 191 515 3553

email: stefan.wermter AT sunderland.ac.uk

http://www.his.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0stw/

http://www.his.sunderland.ac.uk/

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