FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS: MODELING NATURAL ACTION SELECTION

[Modeling Natural Action Selection]

Apologies for cross-postings:

Final Call For Papers:  Modeling Natural Action Selection (at IJCAI 2005)

             MODELING NATURAL ACTION SELECTION
       an International and Interdisciplinary Workshop

       http://www.bath.ac.uk/comp-sci/ai/MNAS-2005/

                 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
                      July 30-31, 2005

In association with:
The 19th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2005)

Introduction:
-------------

Action selection is an agent's continuous problem of choosing what to
do next.  In artificial intelligence, this problem has been addressed
with strategies ranging from constructing long chains of intentions
that provide provably optimal means of achieving goals to reactive or
anytime algorithms that do simple lookups based solely on the external
environment.  But what does nature do?

This multidisciplinary workshop is dedicated to advancing our
understanding of the behavioral patterns and neural substrates
supporting action selection in animals --- including humans.  Examples
of interesting topics include:
o  The variation of action selection strategies across species.
o  The variation of strategies within species across individual,
  social or environmental contexts.
o  Cognitive, neural and embodied models of decision making.

We are seeking participation of researchers from either natural or
artificial intelligence (NI or AI), who propose models for either
human or animal behavior.  We seek experts from neuroscience,
psychology, and the quantitative social sciences as well as AI.  We
hope workshop participants will substantially advance the discipline
both through presenting novel results and by examining and critiquing a wide
variety of modeling approaches.

Requirements:
------------------

We ask that all papers:
o  Reference or describe a model of action selection,
o  Reference or describe a data set derived from the actions of
  living animals or humans, and
o  Make direct comparisons between the model and biological data.

All aspects of action selection are acceptable, from single task
performance to evolutionary models of behavior, from individual
protozoa to human societies.  Our goal for the workshop is to bring
together researchers using a variety of strategies for modeling with
the aim of building an understanding of the currently available models,
tools, advances and challenges in the field.

Our ultimate goal is to create a rich synergy between AI and NI models
of action selection.  A similar synergy has helped advance the fields
of neuroscience and neural networks over the past decade, and has
resulted in a number of journals which regularly publish strong papers
from both fields.

Venue:
---------

This workshop will take place as part of the 19th International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2005), the world's
premiere conference on AI.  Participants in the workshop may wish to
attend the full conference but will not be required to do so.

The venue will be Edinburgh, Scotland.  This will be excellent time to
visit the Scottish capital just prior to the start of the famous
Edinburgh International Festival, and during the Edinburgh Jazz and
Blues Festival. Participants are encouraged to plan to stay on after
the workshop to enjoy the city and take advantage of these events.

The conference dinner (not included in the fees) will be held at:
`a room in town' (http://www.aroomin.co.uk/thetown/) on Sunday night.

Workshop Format:
----------------

The workshop will be held over two days.  The format will consist of

o  twenty minute talks with ten minute discussions,
o  keynote presentations from internationally renowned speakers,
o  poster and discussion sessions, and
o  dinners in town.

Talks will be clustered by approach so that researchers unfamiliar
with the various approaches to modeling action selection will have an
opportunity to learn.  We intend to allow speakers to know the
speaking order well in advance so that they can coordinate their talks
to maximize content and minimize repetition.

Talks will be chosen from submitted papers.  All papers will be
subject to peer review by the program committee. The number of full
papers accepted, as determined by review, may exceed the number of
talk slots available, in which case the remainder of accepted papers
will be offered a special full-paper poster session. The maximum
number of participants is limited by IJCAI to 40. If there is room for
participants without full papers, a second call will be sent out in
May for extended abstracts and ordinary poster submissions.

Speakers:
---------

We now have three confirmed invited speakers (& expect to add a
fourth).  The confirmed speakers (**pending travel funding awards) are:

o  Prof. Randall C. O'Reilly**, University of Colorado Boulder
       Psychology, Cognitive Science and Neuroscience
       http://psych.colorado.edu/~oreilly/

o  Prof. Michael Laver, New York University
       Department of Politics
       http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/laver/laver_home.html

o  Dr. Marius Usher (Reader), Birkbeck University of London
       School of Psychology
       http://www.psyc.bbk.ac.uk/people/academic/usher_m/

Publications:
-------------

A workshop proceedings, published by AISB and printed by IJCAI (and
included in the cost of registration), will include all accepted
papers and poster abstracts.  In addition, a number of journals
(including Cognitive Science and The Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society B) have expressed interest in publishing a special issue
for the best scientific papers from the workshop.  Final negotiations
will depend on the quality of papers submitted to the workshop.

Workshop participants will also discuss creating a further publication
(either a book or journal special issue) emphasizing the techniques
and technology used by the successful modelers.  Again, we have had
offers from Adaptive Behaviour and Connection Science to consider this
volume.

Papers and Participation:
-------------------------

IJCAI workshop participation is limited to 40 people.  Preference will
be given to those who submit papers, but other places may be available.

Workshop papers should be from approximately 4,000 to 8,000 words,
although we will accept papers of up to 8 pages.  For later
publications, we expect the length will be extended for at least a
selection of papers.

Please email submitted papers as a single .pdf file to mnas.ijcai05 at gmail.com.
Be sure to include in the body of the email: (1) the corresponding author's
name, affiliation, and email address, (2) the title and abstract, and (3)
between three and five keywords.

ELECTRONIC PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE:       APRIL 1, 2005
Paper Notifications sent:                                          
May 15, 2005
Camera-ready copy deadline:                                     June 15, 2005
Paperless participant application deadline:                  June 15, 2005
Notice for paperless participants:                               June 30, 2005

Workshop dates:
July 30 - 31, 2005

Organizing Committee:
---------------------

Dr. Joanna J. Bryson
Artificial models of natural Intelligence
Department of Computer Science
University of Bath, UK
BA2 7AY
http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb

Dr. Tony Prescott
Adaptive Behaviour Research Group
Department of Psychology
University of Sheffield, UK
S10 2TP
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~abrg/tony/index.shtml

Dr. Anil K.Seth
The Neurosciences Institute
10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive
San Diego
CA 92121, USA
http://www.nsi.edu/users/seth

Program Committee:
------------------

Gordon Arbuthnott, Dept of Preclinical Veterinary Sciences, University
of Edinburgh, UK

Orlando Avila-Garcia, Adaptive Systems Research Group, University of
Hertsfordshire, UK

Gianluca Baldassarre, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and
Technologies, National Research Council, Italy

Christian Balkenius, Cognitive Science, Lund University, Sweden

Alwyn Barry, Artificial models of natural Intelligence, University of Bath, UK

Bettina Berendt, Institute of Information Systems, Humboldt University
Berlin, Germany

Hagai Bergman, Department of Physiology, Hebrew University, Israel

Rafal Bogacz, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK

Driss Boussaoud, Institute for Cognitive Sciences, CNRS, France

Olivier Buffet, Statistical Machine Learning program, National ICT
Australia, Australia

Lola Canamero, Adaptive Systems Research Group, University of
Hertfordshire, UK

Angelo Cangelosi, Adaptive Behaviour & Cognition, University of Plymouth, UK

Ricardo Chavarriaga, Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience, EPFL,
Switzerland

Rick Cooper, Cognitive Science, Birbeck (University of London), UK

Frederick Crabbe, Computer Science Department, United States Naval Academy, USA

Nathaniel Daw, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University
College London, UK

Peter Dayan, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University
College London, UK

Yiannis Demiris, Intelligent and Interactive Systems Group, Imperial
College London, UK

Peter Dominey, Sequential Cognition and Language Group, CNRS, France

Kenji Doya, Department of Computational Neurobiology, ATR Computational
Neuroscience Laboratories, Japan

Jason Fleischer, Theoretical Neurobiology, The Neurosciences Institute, USA

Philippe Gaussier, Equipe Neurocybernétique, CNRS, France

Agnes Guillot, AnimatLab, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, France

Kevin Gurney, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK

Jim Houk, Deparment of Physiology, Northwestern University, Illinois, USA

Karl F. MacDorman, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan

Mark Humphries, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK

Mark Humphrys, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland

Jeff Krichmar, Theoretical Neurobiology, The Neurosciences Institute, USA

Brian S. Logan, Department of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK

Will Lowe, Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Jean-Arcady Meyer, AnimatLab, CNRS, France

Michael J. North, Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems
Simulation, Decision and Information Sciences Division, Argonne
National Laboratory, USA

Peter Redgrave, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK

Frank Ritter, Applied Cognitive Science Lab, Penn State University, USA

Deb Roy, Media Laboratory, MIT, USA

David Sallach, Center for Complex Adaptive Systems, Argonne National
Laboratory, USA

Emmet Spier, Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics,
Sussex University, UK