ALife IV Conference Report, Hugo de Garis, ATR

[Terry Sejnowski]

>I remember a conversation with Chris Langton, wondering what the
>next hot topic will be. We didnt know. Well, now I think I know what it
>will be. I had premonitions of it listening to Terzopolous's and Sims's talks.
>My feeling is that enough people are now playing around with building
>artificial nervous systems, (e.g. the "3 musketeers" at Sussex, UK; Beer and 
>Arbib in the US; our group at ATR, Japan; Nolfi et al in Italy; etc) that the 
>time is ripe for the birth of a new field, which I call simply "Brain 
>Building". I'm sticking my neck out here, but I feel fairly confident this 
>will happen. I'm predicting that the field of ALife will give birth to this 
>new field. I'm curious to see how other people feel about this prediction. 


The First Annual Telluride Workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering
sponsored by the NSF recently tackled this very issue.  The goal
is to develop a new low power autonomous technology suitable for
guiding robots like the ones that Mark Tilden has been evolving.
(It may be significant that Mark attended this workshop rather
than the AL Meeting).  Christof Koch and I helped to organize
this workshop which brought together engineers and neuroscientists
from academia and industry who were interested in building living
creatures.

Low power analog vlsi chips already exist that can analyze visual and auditory
sensory inputs and cortical circuit chips are being developed by Rodney Douglas
and Misha Mahowald; the principles of sensorimotor integration as
studied by Dana Ballard and Richard Andersen are at the focus of
the theoretical breakthroughs that will be needed to achieve the
goal of autonomy in the real world by the next century.

One important milestone was announced at the workshop:
Reliable analog on-chip learning has been developed in Carver
Mead's laboratory that will make possible adaptive mechanisms and learning
at all levels of processing, as occurs in biological systems.

A report on the outcome of the workshop will be made available
via ftp -- an announcement  will follow in August.

Terry

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