Connectionists: Deadline Extended: Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop 2016

[Ralph Etienne-Cummings]

Call for Topic Area Proposals
*Extended Deadline: January 25th, 2016*
2016 Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop

Telluride, Colorado, June 26 –July 16, 2016

We are now accepting proposals for Topic Areas in the 2016 Telluride
Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop.  We support topics and
projects in neuromorphic cognition, particularly those that involve solving
challenging ‘everyday’ tasks that incorporate domain-specific knowledge,
exploration, prediction, and problem solving. In particular, we are
interested in projects that hold promise for addressing Grand Challenge
types of problems that do not have strong solutions of any form,
neuromorphic or not.  These Challenge problems should feature long-duration
sensorimotor problems that involve autonomous cognitive decision making.
Examples might include tasks such as navigating through an unknown
environment to locate an object or reach a desired location, visual and
auditory understanding of human actions, adaptively manipulating unknown or
complex objects in the service of a task, playing a game requiring
inference of hidden information or long-term planning and learning,
learning a new language, etc. Proposals aiming to bring to reality the
capabilities of hardware technologies and/or state-of-the-art approaches
from disciplines such as machine learning are also encouraged. Topic
proposals that aim to solve a particular problem using the
multidisciplinary experience of participants will be favored over topics
that simply gather a large number of people working within a discipline, or
using a single technology, or approach.

Topic areas for this summer's Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering
Workshop <http://ine-web.org> will be chosen from proposals submitted to
the organizers.


Topic areas can span a large field; we are looking for leadership in
planning activities and inviting good people in a field.  Although past
topic areas have tended to be very broad and discipline-oriented (e.g.,
cognition, audition, vision, robotics, neural interfacing, neuromorphic
VLSI, etc.), application-oriented topic areas (e.g., sensor fusion,
game-playing robot, object recognition, sound localization, human robot
interaction, etc.) are especially desirable.

Topic area leaders will receive housing for themselves and their invitees,
and limited travel funds. Topic area leaders will help to define the field
of neuromorphic cognition engineering through the projects they pursue and
the people they invite.  They shape their topic by inviting speakers and
project leaders (the invitees) and by initiating topic area project
discussions prior to the workshop.

Teams of two organizers are required. One of the organizers should be an
attendee of a previous Telluride Workshop (in any capacity) and was present
at the Workshop for at least one week.

Pre-workshop topic area choices and study assignments.

Before the workshop begins, each topic area will be required to prepare and
distribute study materials that constitute: 1) an introductory presentation
(e.g., pptx, video, review paper) of the fundamental knowledge associated
with the topic area that everyone at the workshop should be exposed to, and
2) a few critical papers that the participants in the topic area should
read before the workshop. The topic area should 3) begin a serious group
discussion of the projects (e.g., via Facebook, Skype, email, etc).

 The maximum 2-page proposals should include:

1. Title of topic area.

2. Names of the two topic leaders, their affiliations, and contact
information (email

   addresses).

3. A paragraph explaining the focus and goals of the topic area.

4. A list of possible specific topic area projects.

5. A list of example invitees (up to six names and institutions). No
commitments necessary.

6. Any other material that fits within the two-page limit that will help us
make a smart choice.

Send your topic area proposal in pdf or text format to org15 at neuromorphs.net
with subject line containing "topic area proposal".

Proposals must be received by January 25, 2016; proposals received after
the deadline may still be considered if space is available.

We expect to accept 4-5 topic areas, each with 5 invitees. If your proposal
for the topic area is not accepted, we will work with you to see if there
is a natural way to include your ideas (and you) into the accepted topic
areas. We hope to have significant turn-over each year in the topic areas
and leaders to ensure fresh new ideas and participants.

See the Institute of Neuromorphic Engineering (www.ine-web.org) for
background information on the workshop and neuromorphs.net
<http://neuromorphs.net/nm/wiki/2015> for past workshop wikis.

We look forward to your topic proposals!

Deadline: January 25, 2016

The Workshop Directors:

Cornelia Fermüller <http://www.cfar.umd.edu/~fer/> (University of
Maryland), Ralph Etienne-Cummings
<http://etienne.ece.jhu.edu/people/ralph/index.html> (Johns Hopkins
Univ.) Shih-Chii
Liu <https://www.ini.uzh.ch/~shih/> (University of Zurich and ETH
Zurich), Timmer
Horiuchi <https://www.isr.umd.edu/faculty/horiuchi> (University of
Maryland), Katalin Gotthard
<http://physiological-sciences.arizona.edu/katalin-gothard> (University of
Arizona), Michael Pfeiffer <https://www.ini.uzh.ch/~pfeiffer/index.html>
(University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), Francisco Barranco <fbarranco at ugr.es>
(University of Granada)

Former 2007-2012 Workshop Director:

Tobi Delbruck <https://www.ini.uzh.ch/~tobi/> (University of Zurich and ETH
Zurich)



-- 
Ralph Etienne-Cummings, PhD, FIEEE
Professor and Chairman
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Computational Sensor Motor Systems Lab
Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD
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