<div dir="ltr">CALL FOR PAPERS <br><br><font size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt"></span></font><font size="2">**<span style="font-size:10pt">Apologies for cross posting ** </span></font><br><b><br>IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS)<br><br></b>Special Issue on "<b><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">Symbol Emergence and Developmental Systems: Social Symbol Grounding and Embodied Cognition in Humans and Robots</span></b>"<br><font size="2"><br></font><b><font size="2">I. Aim and Scope </font><br><br></b>Exploring
human cognitive development constitutes a basic step towards endowing
robots with high level human-like cognitive functions. Human embodied
cognition follows a seamless process of development, which includes the
development of sensorimotor skills, understanding concrete ideas and
events, using concepts representing physical entities to describe
objects, and coordinating multiple abstractions within complex
representations. Investigating these aspects that bootstrap human
cognitive development – through appropriate theoretical and
computational cognitive modeling – allows for making robots capable of
handling objects through the cumulative learning experiences that could
develop sensorimotor skills, developing social skills through social
learning strategies, grounding abstract concepts in the sensorimotor
system, and developing linguistic skills in order to represent
situations through language within interaction.<br><br>A symbol system
combines a group of tokens into structures and manipulates them through
explicit rules to produce new expressions. The task of assigning a
meaning to each meaningless symbol in a structure defines the "Symbol
Grounding" problem, which has static physical and social components. The
"Physical Symbol Grounding" allows an agent to form an internal
explicit representation of an external-world referent so as to interpret
symbols semantically. Whereas, the "Social Symbol Grounding" allows for
developing a common lexicon of symbols grounded in perception
information within a population of agents, which could lead to a gradual
emergence of language through social interaction. A recent approach to
semantically interpreting a symbol system is "Symbol Emergence", which
accounts for the dynamic and self-organized nature of symbols that
constitute human cognition. These complementary representations of a
symbol system are still considered as real challenges in cognitive
developmental robotics, and they require more elaborate theoretical and
experimental studies in order to better understand the aspects of human
behavior development.<br><br><b>II. Themes <br><br></b>This special issue aims to shed light on cutting-edge research lines in cognitive developmental robotics at the<b> </b>intersection
of human cognitive science, artificial intelligence, machine learning,
language science, and robotics research. Topics relevant to this special
issue include, but are not limited to:<b><br></b><ul><li> Human symbol systems and symbol emergence in robotics.</li><li> Cognitive modeling of human behavior.</li><li> Language and action development.</li><li> Learning from demonstration.</li><li> Action sequence learning.</li><li> Conceptual spaces for cognitive robotics.</li><li> Fluid and embodied construction grammar for cognitive robotics.</li></ul><b><font size="2">III. Submission </font><br></b><br>Manuscripts should be prepared according to the journal's “Information for Authors” instructions found at <span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><a href="http://cis.ieee.org/publications.html" target="_blank">http://cis.ieee.org/publicatio<wbr>ns.html</a></span>, and submissions should be done through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center: <span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><a href="https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee" target="_blank">https://mc.manuscriptcentral.c<wbr>om/tcds-ieee</a></span> (please select the category “SI: Symbol Emergence”).<br><b><br><font size="2">IV. Important Dates</font><br><br></b>15 December 2016 – Deadline for papers submission<br>31 March 2017 – First notification for authors<br>15 May 2017 – Deadline for revised papers submission<br>15 June 2017 – Final notification for authors<b><br><br>V. Guest Editors <br></b><ol><li><b>Amir Aly</b>, Ritsumeikan University, Japan (<span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><a href="mailto:amir.aly@em.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp" target="_blank">amir.aly@em.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp</a></span><wbr>)</li><li><b>Sascha Griffiths</b>, Queen Mary University of London, UK (<span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><a href="mailto:sascha.griffiths@qmul.ac.uk" target="_blank">sascha.griffiths@qmul.ac.uk</a></span>)</li><li><b>Francesca Stramandinoli</b>, IIT, Italy (<span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><a href="mailto:francesca.stramandinoli@iit.it" target="_blank">francesca.stramandinoli@iit.i<wbr>t</a></span>)</li><li><b>Tadahiro Taniguchi</b>, Ritsumeikan University, Japan (<span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><a href="mailto:taniguchi@em.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp" target="_blank">taniguchi@em.ci.ritsumei.ac.j<wbr>p</a></span>)</li><li><b>Paul Vogt</b>, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (<span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><a href="mailto:p.a.vogt@uvt.nl" target="_blank">p.a.vogt@uvt.nl</a></span>)<br></li></ol>More details about the scope of this journal special issue and the guest editors are available on: <a href="https://intelligent-robots-ws.ensta-paristech.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/TCDS_SI_CFP.pdf" target="_blank">IEEE_TCDS_SI_CFP.pdf</a> .<br><br><font size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt">------------------------------<wbr>-------------------------<br><br></span><span>Dr. Amir Aly<br>Postdoctoral Research Associate<br>Emergent Systems Laboratory<br>College of Information Science and Engineering - Ritsumeikan University<br>1-1-1 Noji Higashi, Kusatsu, Shiga 525-8577<br>Japan</span></font></div>