Connectionists: BICA 2012 Call for Papers

[Antonio Chella 062003]

BICA 2012 CALL FOR PAPER

Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA), Third Annual 
Meeting of the BICA Society
Palermo, Italy, October 31st  - November 3rd 
http://chilab.dinfo.unipa.it/bica2012/ 

The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind, known as the BICA 
Challenge, calls for our joint efforts to develop biologically-inspired intelligent agents that can be 
accepted and trusted by the human society in various roles, on an equal footing with human agents. 
The main objective of BICA 2012 is to take a significant step forward towards the BICA Challenge.

The topics of BICA 2012 will include (but will not be limited to):
-	models capable of inducing the sense of presence in artifacts;
-	the “critical mass” of a human-level learner;
-	emotional competence and social intelligence in artifacts;
-	machine consciousness and BICA;
-	models of perception, cognition and action; 
-	robust and scalable learning mechanisms;
-	realistic neural networks for BICA;
-	human-like episodic and semantic memory;
-	metacognition in BICA; 
-	self-regulated, bootstrapped and meta-learning; 
-	language acquisition and symbol grounding; 
-	non-von-Neumann computational systems for BICA;
-	a roadmap to the BICA Challenge.

Format: 
A two-day conference including keynote talks, paper presentations, panel discussions and exhibits.

Chairs:
General Chair: Antonio Chella (University of Palermo, Italy) 
Program Chairs: 
Kamilla Jóhannsdóttir (Reykjavik University, Iceland), Roberto Pirrone (University of Palermo, Italy)
Local Organization Chair: Rosario Sorbello (University of Palermo, Italy) 

Confirmed keynote talks: 
Karlheinz Meier (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University, Japan)
Giorgio Ascoli (George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA)
Igor Aleksander (Imperial College, London, UK)
Giulio Sandini (IIT and University of Genoa, Italy)
Kristinn R. Thórisson (IIIM and Reykjavik University, Iceland)
Ricardo Sanz (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain)
Pentti Haikonen (University of Illinois at Springfield, USA)
Christian Lebiere (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
Michele Migliore (CNR, Palermo, Italy)
Soo-Young Lee (KAIST, Republic of Korea)
Alexei Samsonovich (George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA)
Raul Arrabales (Univerdidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain)
Ignazio Licata (ISEM, Palermo, Italy)

Submission categories are: 
- short abstracts;
- extended abstracts;
- position papers up to two pages;
- research papers up to six pages. 
Submissions longer than six pages are welcome; a fee of 50 USD per extra page will be charged to 
authors.

Paper and abstract submission:
Please submit your paper using the EasyChair Conference System:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bica2012 

The conference proceedings will be published in a volume of the Advances in Intelligent and Soft 
Computing Book Series by Springer (indexed by ISI, Scopus, DBLP, among others). See Instructions for 
Authors: http://www.springer.com/series/4240  

Extended versions of selected papers will be published after the conference in a special issue of the 
journal BICA (Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, published by Elsevier) and in a special issue 
of the International Journal of Machine Consciousness (published by World Scientific).

Critical dates:
April 1st : submission site opened;
June 1st : submission deadline; 
June 30th : notification of acceptance;
July 15th : camera ready papers due (Springer template mandatory);
October 31st : pre-conference workshops and reception;
November 1st  - 2nd : BICA 2012 conference;
November 3rd : Excursion.
NOTE: Please submit paper abstract as soon as possible!

Information about BICA 2012 can be found at http://chilab.dinfo.unipa.it/bica2012/   
We are looking forward to seeing you in Palermo! Vi aspettiamo!