Connectionists: Final CFP: NIPS 2012 Workshop on Information in Perception and Action

[tjung@ulg.ac.be]

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       INFORMATION IN PERCEPTION AND ACTION 

              NIPS 2012 WORKSHOP 

    December 7, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, United States

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Description
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Since its inception for describing the laws of communication in the
1940's, information theory has been considered in fields beyond its 
original application area and, in particular, it was long attempted
to utilize it for the description of intelligent agents. Already 
Attneave (1954) and Barlow (1961) suspected that neural information
processing might follow principles of information theory and 
Laughlin (1998) demonstrated that information processing comes at a
high metabolic cost; this implies that there would be evolutionary
pressure pushing organismic information processing towards the optimal
levels of data throughput predicted by information theory. This 
becomes particularly interesting when one considers the whole 
perception-action cycle, including feedback.


In the last decade, significant progress has been made in this 
direction, linking information theory and control. The ensuing insights
allow to address a large range of fundamental questions pertaining not
only to the perception-action cycle, but to general issues of 
intelligence, and allow to solve classical problems of AI and machine
learning in a novel way.


Call for Participation
----------------------
The workshop aims to present work on progress in AI, machine learning,
control, as well as biologically plausible cognitive modeling that 
is based on information theory. We invite contributions for oral
presentations that should fall in one of the following categories:


- Information-theoretic methods for learning (including model 
learning, reinforcement learning, but also concept learning)

- Information theory in control; relation with the statistical
physics of control theory

- Information theory in games; quantifying the value of information 

- Information-theoretic approaches towards general artificial 
intelligence, such as universal reward and utility structures 
(e.g., predictive information, empowerment, etc.); 
principled approaches towards goal and subgoal generation

- Influence of "embodiment" on performance and structuring of 
cognitive tasks; emergence of concepts from agent-world 
interaction

- Fundamental limits on information processing capabilities; 
minimal solutions for given tasks and optimal performance 
for constrained perception/actuation 

- Information- and entropy-based regularization and kernel 
techniques



The submissions should be in the form of long (4-6 pages) or short 
(1/2-1 page) abstracts. Timely and novel work will be particularly 
considered, but also more mature work may be contributed---please 
indicate which one you aim for. The abstracts will be placed on the
workshop website.

Submissions in PDF (NIPS format) should be emailed to

  tjung at ulg.ac.be 

with the subject line "NIPS 2012 Workshop Submission" no later than 
October 3rd, 2012. The notification of acceptance will be sent out
on October 7th, 2012. All accepted submissions will have the 
opportunity for oral presentation, and ample opportunity for 
discussion is integrated in the workshop.


Important Dates
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October 3, 2012: Submission  
October 7, 2012: Notification 
December 7, 2012: NIPS Workshop 



Organizers
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Naftali Tishby, Hebrew University, Israel
Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Tobias Jung, University of Liege, Belgium


Web
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http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~tjung/nips12workshop