Connectionists: Deadline Extended: CFP - Special Issue on "Symbol Emergence and Developmental Systems: Social Symbol Grounding and Embodied Cognition in Humans and Robots" - IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS)

[Sascha S. Griffiths]

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***Apologies for multiple postings of this announcement***

***The deadline for manuscript submission has been extended to 20th, 
February 2017.***

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IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS)


Special Issue on "Symbol Emergence and Developmental Systems: Social 
Symbol Grounding and Embodied Cognition in Humans and Robots"

I. Aim and Scope

Exploring human cognitive development constitutes a basic step towards 
endowing robots with high level human-like cognitive functions. Human 
embodied cognition follows a seamless process of development, which 
includes the development of sensorimotor skills, understanding concrete 
ideas and events, using concepts representing physical entities to 
describe objects, and coordinating multiple abstractions within complex 
representations. Investigating these aspects that bootstrap human 
cognitive development – through appropriate theoretical and 
computational cognitive modeling – allows for making robots capable of 
handling objects through the cumulative learning experiences that could 
develop sensorimotor skills, developing social skills through social 
learning strategies, grounding abstract concepts in the sensorimotor 
system, and developing linguistic skills in order to represent 
situations through language within interaction.

A symbol system combines a group of tokens into structures and 
manipulates them through explicit rules to produce new expressions. The 
task of assigning a meaning to each meaningless symbol in a structure 
defines the "Symbol Grounding" problem, which has static physical and 
social components. The "Physical Symbol Grounding" allows an agent to 
form an internal explicit representation of an external-world referent 
so as to interpret symbols semantically. Whereas, the "Social Symbol 
Grounding" allows for developing a common lexicon of symbols grounded in 
perception information within a population of agents, which could lead 
to a gradual emergence of language through social interaction. A recent 
approach to semantically interpreting a symbol system is "Symbol 
Emergence", which accounts for the dynamic and self-organized nature of 
symbols that constitute human cognition. These complementary 
representations of a symbol system are still considered as real 
challenges in cognitive developmental robotics, and they require more 
elaborate theoretical and experimental studies in order to better 
understand the aspects of human behavior development.

II. Themes

This special issue aims to shed light on cutting-edge research lines in 
cognitive developmental robotics at the intersection of human cognitive 
science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, language science, 
and robotics research. Topics relevant to this special issue include, 
but are not limited to:

-     Human symbol systems and symbol emergence in robotics.
-     Cognitive modeling of human behavior.
-     Language and action development.
-     Learning from demonstration.
-     Action sequence learning.
-     Conceptual spaces for cognitive robotics.
-     Fluid and embodied construction grammar for cognitive robotics.

III. Submission

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the journal's “Information 
for Authors” instructions found at 
http://cis.ieee.org/publications.html, and submissions should be done 
through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center: 
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee (please select the category 
“SI: Symbol Emergence”).

IV. Important Dates

20 February 2017 – Deadline for papers submission
20 May 2017 – First notification for authors
30 June 2017 – Deadline for revised papers submission
30 July 2017 – Final notification for authors

V. Guest Editors

1. Amir Aly, Ritsumeikan University, Japan (amir.aly at em.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp)
2. Sascha Griffiths, Universität Hamburg, Germany 
(sascha.griffiths at uni-hamburg.de)
3. Francesca Stramandinoli, IIT, Italy (francesca.stramandinoli at iit.it)
4. Tadahiro Taniguchi, Ritsumeikan University, Japan 
(taniguchi at em.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp <taniguchi at em.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp>)
5. Paul Vogt, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (p.a.vogt at uvt.nl)

More details about the scope of this journal special issue and the guest 
editors are available on: 
https://intelligent-robots-ws.ensta-paristech.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/TCDS_SI_CFP.pdf

-- 
Sascha S. Griffiths, PhD
Knowledge Technology Group
Department of Informatics
University of Hamburg
Vogt Koelln Str. 30
22527 Hamburg, Germany

Email: griffiths at informatik.uni-hamburg.de
http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WTM/
http://www.master-intelligent-adaptive-systems.com/