AAAI Fall Symposium on Embodied Cognition and Action

[Maja Mataric]

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                 Call For Participation

    AAAI 1996 Fall Symposium on Embodied Cognition and Action
    ----------------------------------------------------------
                 to be held at MIT Nov 9-11, 1996

 	    Submission Deadline: April 15, 1996.


The role of physical embodiment in cognition has long been the subject
of debate.  It is largely accepted in AI that embodiment has strong
implications on the control strategies for generating purposive and
intelligent behavior in the world.  Some theories have proposed that
embodiment not only constrains but may also facilitate certain types
of higher-level cognition.  Evidence from neuroscience allows for
postulating shared mechanisms for low-level control of embodied action
(e.g., motor plans for limb movement) and higher-level cognition
(e.g., abstract plans).  Work in animal behavior has also addressed
the potential links between the two systems and linguistic theories
have long recognized the role of physical and spatial metaphors in
language.

The symposium will study the role of embodiment in both scaling up
control and grounding cognition.  We will explore ways of extending
the existing typically low-level sub-cognitive systems such as
autonomous robots and agents, as well as grounding more abstract
typically disembodied cognitive systems.  We will draw from AI,
ethology, neuroscience, and other sources in order to focus on the
implications of embodiment in cognition and action, and explore work
that has been done in the areas of applying physical metaphors to more
abstract higher-level cognition.

Topics and questions of interest include:

* What spatial metaphors that can be used for abstract/higher-level
cognition?

* What non-spatial metaphors can be applied in higher-level cognition?

* What alternatives to symbolic representations (e.g., analogical,
procedural, etc.) can be successfully employed in embodied cognition?

* How can evidence from neuroscience and ethology benefit work in
synthetic embodied cognition and embodied AI?  Can we gain more than
just inspiration from biological data in this area?  Are there
specific constraints and/or mechanisms we can usefully model?

* (How) Do methods for modeling embodied insect and animal behavior
scale up to higher-level cognition?

* How do metaphors from embodiment apply to everyday activity?

* What computational and representational structures are necessary
and/or sufficient for enabling embodied cognition?

* What are some successfully implemented embodied cognition systems?

The symposium will focus on group discussions and panels with a few
inspiring presentations and overviews of relevant work.

Organizing committee: 
--------------------- 

Dana Ballard, University of Rochester, dana at cs.rochester.edu; 
Rod Brooks, MIT, brooks at ai.mit.edu; 
Daniel Dennett, Tufts University, ddennett at pearl.tufts.edu; 
Simon Giszter, Medical College of Pennsylvania, simon at SwampThing.medcolpa.edu; 
Maja Mataric (chair), Brandeis University, maja at cs.brandeis.edu; 
Erich Prem, Austrian AI Institute, erich at ai.univie.ac.at; 
Terence Sanger, MIT, tds at ai.mit.edu;
Stefan Schaal, Georgia Tech, sschaal at cc.gatech.edu;

Submission Information:
-----------------------

We invite the participation of researchers who have been working on
embodied cognition and action in the fields of AI, neuroscience,
ethology, and robotics.

Prospective participants should submit a brief paper (5 pages or less)
or an extended abstract describing their research or interests.
Papers should be submitted electronically, in postscript or plain text
format, via ftp to
ftp.cs.brandeis.edu/pub/faculty/maja/aaai96-fs/. Participants will
have an opportunity to contribute to the final working notes.

Detailed ftp instructions:
--------------------------

compress your-paper (both Unix compress and gzip commands are ok)
ftp ftp.cs.brandeis.edu (129.64.2.5, but check in case it has changed)
give anonymous as your login name
give your e-mail address as password
set transmission to binary (just type the command BINARY)
cd to /aaai96-fs
put your-paper

Relevant Dates:
---------------

Apr 15, 1996: Submissions due
May 17, 1996: Notification of acceptance given
Aug 23, 1996: Material for inclusion into the working notes due
Nov 9-11, 96: AAAI Fall Symposium 

The WWW home page for this symposium can be found at:
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~maja/aaai96-fs/