Connectionists: [meetings] Call for contributions: Workshop on "Role of movement-based active perception in navigation and its neurorobotic correlates" at SWARM 2019, Okinawa, Japan

[Danish Shaikh]

Call for contributions
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Workshop on "Role of movement-based active perception in navigation and its neurorobotic correlates" at SWARM 2019: The 3rd International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics, Okinawa, Japan

Date: November 22, 2019

Location: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Onna-son, Okinawa, Japan

Workshop url: https://arilab.unit.oist.jp/swarm2019/#ws


Workshop overview
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Active perception in animals involves executing behaviours that move sensory appendages (e.g. eyes, pinnae, antennae or whiskers) in space to increase flow of sensory stimuli as well as the sampled information content. This increased sampling can significantly improve the animal's understanding of its environment. In this context, perception (interpretation of sensory stimuli) and action (behaviours that move the sensory appendages) are tightly coupled. Several biological studies have identified the important role of movement-based active sensing for increasing sensory volumes and many robotic studies have investigated the principles underlying active perception in adaptive behaviour. Insects and rodents are very promising model organisms to study active perception, as they possess highly mobile sensory appendages, a wide variety of sensilla and a well-studied nervous system. The neurorobotic approach, i.e. developing robotic models of biological neural mechanisms, is well-suited for hypothesis-testing as it allows one to isolate and embed the neural mechanism of interest within an artificial body that can sense and act in the real world. This relieves scientists from the task of modelling the statistics of sensory stimuli, as the real world provides these statistics for free. This full day workshop brings together leading experts, from both biology and neurorobotics perspectives, to shed light on the principles underlying active antennal perception as well as its neural correlates and discuss the neurorobotic approach to modelling active perception.

Learning outcomes:

- Understanding the basic concepts and principles of active perception
- Knowledge of neural correlates of active perception
- Knowledge of embodied AI and the neurorobotic approach
- Applying these concepts and knowledge in developing agents/robots that utilise actively moving antennae to execute navigation behaviours such as taxis

The full-day workshop consists of:

- Theory (lectures): Invited talks by experts from biology and neurorobotics,
- Practice tutorial: Hypothesis-testing via neurorobots in simulated and/or real-world navigation tasks,
- Discussion and future directions


Submission guidelines
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Contributions in the form of 1 page conf. style abstract on active perception. This includes both studies in biological organisms as well as in robots. All abstracts must be formatted in the SWARM conference style, templates for which can be found here -

https://arilab.unit.oist.jp/swarm2019/#submission

Selected contributions will be presented in a form of a poster during the workshop. We particularly encourage young scientists to contribute their research results (reporting early-stage research where results are not yet available is welcome as well). We also welcome live robot demonstrations on active perception models. Submissions have to be sent to danish[at]mmmi.sdu.dk (please replace [at] with @) in PDF format only. One author per accepted workshop contribution (poster and/or demo) is required to register for and attend the workshop to present the accepted abstract.

Outstanding contributions might be selected for oral presentations.


Relevant dates
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Deadline for abstract submission: August 21, 2019

Anywhere on Earth time - https://time.is/Anywhere_on_Earth

Notification of acceptance: September 21, 2019

Workshop: November 22, 2019


Tentative list of speakers
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- Einat Couzin-Fuchs (University of Konstanz, Germany)

- Venkatesh N. Murthy (Harvard University, USA)

- Danish Shaikh (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)

- Alejandro Pequeño Zurro (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)


Workshop organizers
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Danish Shaikh

Alejandro Pequeño Zurro


Contact
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Danish Shaikh (danish[at]mmmi.sdu.dk)

Assistant professor
Embodied Systems for Robotics and Learning
Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute
University of Southern Denmark
Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M
Denmark
Tel. (office): +45 6550 9526
www.sdu.dk


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