Connectionists: Call For Participation - Workshop on Spatio-temporal Aspects of Embodied Predictive Processing - StEPP @ ICDL2021 - 22.08.2021

[Stefan Heinrich]

Call For Participation - Workshop on Spatio-temporal Aspects of Embodied Predictive Processing - StEPP @ IEEE ICDL2021


Schedule and Venue

Date: 22. August 2021, 13:30-18:00h (GMT+8)
Location: Online (Details will be announced on the website)
All details and full schedule: https://sites.google.com/view/stepp21


Aims and Scope:

Understanding human intelligence and building strong AI systems is a key challenge for our generation. A particularly puzzling aspect is that the human brain seems to cope very well with the highly variable and uncertain nature of perception and action, regarding both their signal characteristic and how they extend over time. Furthermore, it seems apparent that the information processing in the brain always involves previous bodily experiences and all our senses, thus is embodied and crossmodal. For explaining these characteristics, there are strong accounts that the brain is constantly predicting sensory input and feedback while minimising free energy in the prediction and is hierarchically abstracting the perception as well as hierarchically composing action. Furthermore, it is also hypothesised that mechanistic priors in the brain’s information processing induce a failure of hierarchical inference in the brain, accounting for atypical perception and action of psychiatric 
disorders. For example, some brains might have developed to focus too strongly on current sensory input while others might focus too strongly on memorised previous experience. A typically developed brain, in contrast, would show a fine balance compared to these two extreme priors. The big open mystery is: how is the brain developing this on a mechanistic level and thus how can this get learned within an AI system?

Thus, to lift this mystery, we further need to bring together research from computational neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. With this workshop, we particularly want to wrap up different recent hypotheses, models, and experiments and discuss in-depth how to shape future imaging, behavioural, and developmental robotics studies as a complement to computational modelling and bio-inspired artificial intelligent algorithms. As a guiding theme, we aim to approach the following central questions:

- How does the brain learn spatio-temporal stochasticity in perception and action?

- What is the role of priors in learning spatio-temporal adaptive prediction?

- How can developmental robotics help us to study spatio-temporal stochasticity as an analogy to infant learning?

We examine these questions with the insight from invited key speakers from complementary fields as well as original contributions in breakout sessions in order to conclude the next steps within a panel discussion.


Keynotes/Panellists and topics:

- Jun Tani, Cognitive Neurorobotics, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)
   An analysis of meta-level cognitive processes of a variational recurrent neural network model when acting with the environment.

- Marcel van Gerven, Artificial Cognitive Systems, Donders Institute, Radboud University
   How can the brain match the unreasonable effectiveness of backpropagation?

- Takuya Isomura, Brain Intelligence Theory, RIKEN Center for Brain Science
   Reverse engineering Bayesian aspect of canonical neural networks.

- Takamitsu Watanabe, Brain Network Dynamics, International Research Center for Neurointelligence (IRCN), The University of Tokyo
   Global and local brain dynamics underlying typical and atypical human intelligence.


Organisers:

Stefan Heinrich, IRCN, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Shingo Murata, Dept. Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Keio University, Japan
Yukie Nagai, IRCN & Institute for AI and Beyond, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Yuichi Yamashita, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Japan


-- 
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Dr. Stefan Heinrich
Postdoctoral Project Researcher
Cognitive Developmental Robotics Lab
The University of Tokyo, Institutes for Advanced Studies,
International Research Center for Neurointelligence

Email: heinrich.stefan at ircn.jp
https://developmental-robotics.jp/en/members/stefan_heinrich/
https://ircn.jp/en/
https://stefanheinrich.net/
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