Roberto Cordeschi : Modelling adaptive and intelligent behaviour: some historical and epistemological issues
Biography Roberto Cordeschi is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Faculty of Philosophy of La Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. His research interests include the history of Cybernetics and the epistemological issues of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of several publications on these topics, including The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetic, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2002. Web site: http://w3.uniroma1.it/cordeschi/ Ryohei Kanzaki : Insect-Machine Hybrid System for Understanding an Adaptive Behavior
Insects are the most diverse and abundant animal group representing >70% of all known animal species. They display a diversity of sophisticated behaviors adapted to their environments by the processing of a simple nervous system, a so-called microbrain system. Insects will become an excellent model for understanding adaptive control in biological systems. We have developed an insect-machine hybrid system that acts based on the behavioral or the brain/neural output of an insect, as a novel experimental system that manipulates the interaction between an insect and the real environment in order to evaluate and understand environmental adaptation.
We have used a male silkmoth as a robot controller because the moth exhibits a well-defined pheromone searching behavior, the neural basis of which has been well characterized by our group. The robot measures the behavior of an insect tethered on the robot and moves based on the insect’s behavior or the neural activity of the insect brain. Therefore, it is possible to cause changes in the same way as manipulation of the sensory-motor system of the insect by giving arbitrary manipulation to the motion system of the robot.
First in this lecture, as an example of adaptive behavior of an insect, odor-source orientation behavior and its neural basis will be shown. Second, tests of the feasibility of the behavioral strategy based on the neural system, by implementation in robots, will be shown. Finally, I will demonstrate the insect-machine hybrid system that will lead to great insight for evaluating and understanding adaptive behaviors, which will inspire control and communication in engineered systems.
Biography Ryohei Kanzaki received his B.S., M.S. and D.Sc. degree in Neurobiology from the Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Tsukuba in 1980, 1983 and 1986, respectively. From 1987 to 1990 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Arizona Research Laboratories, Division of Neurobiology, University of Arizona. From 1991 to 2003 he was successively an assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor at the Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Tsukuba. From 2004 to 2006 he was a full professor at Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo. Since 2006 he is a full professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo. He is a vice president of the Japanese Society for Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry, and a councilor of the Zoological Society of Japan.
1987 The Zoological Society of Japan: Zoological Science Award 1993 The Zoological Society of Japan: Zoological Science Award 1994 The Japanese Association for the Study of Olfaction and Taste: Takasago Award 1996 The Japanese Society for Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry: Yoshida Award Yasuo Kuniyoshi : Body Shapes Brain -- Emergence and Development of Behavior and Mind from Embodied Interaction Dynamics --
Through a series of experiments, we revealed that embodiment imposes stable global structures on the interaction dynamics, and an appropriate drive mechanism such as a coupled chaos system can freely explore and discover such stable dynamical patterns.
Based on the principles, we are now experimenting with a simulated baby, from its fetal to neonatal period, on the emergence and development of its motor behavior and neural orgnization. The baby ``plays'' around with self body and the environment, discovering ``what it can do'' and self organizing its brain based on the experiences. In the coming years, the baby will acquire its ``original'' concepts of actions, objects, self and others, and even words.
Biography Yasuo Kuniyoshi is a Professor at the Department of Mechano-Informatics, School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan. He received M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in information technology from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. From 1991 to 2000, he was a Research Scientist and then a Senior Research Scientist at Electrotechnical Laboratory, AIST, MITI, Japan. From 1996 to 1997 he was a Visiting Scholar at MIT AI Lab. In 2001 he was appointed as an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo. Since 2005, he is a Professor at the same university. His research interests include emergence and development of embodied cognition, humanoid robot intelligence, machine understanding of human actions and intentions.
He published over 270 technical papers and received IJCAI 93 Outstanding Paper Award, Best Paper Awards from Robotics Society of Japan, Sato Memorial Award for Intelligent Robotics Research, Okawa Publications Prize and other awards.
For further information about his research, visit http://www.isi.imi.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ Linda Smith : Thinking and learning close to the sensory-motor surface creates knowledge that transcends the here and now
Biography Dr. Smith is a Chancellor's Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University - Bloomington. She received her B.S. degree in 1973 from the University of Wisconsin ? Madison and her Ph.D. in psychology from the Universityof Pennsylvania in 1977. She joined the faculty at Indiana University in 1977. Her research is directed to understanding developmental processes especially at it applies to early cognitive development and to the interaction of perception, action and language in that developmental process. She has published over 100 research articles and is co-author with Esther Thelen of A Dynamical Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Her research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Child Health and Development and the National Institute of Mental Health. You may find out more about her research and laboratory at www.iub.edu/~cogdev |
Only recently it has become better known that the use of machine models to study theadaptive and intelligent behaviour of organisms predates the rise of Cybernetics: it dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century. At that time, some psychologists, biologists and also engineers raised a number of epistemological issues that are at the core of current machine modelling methodology, as it has been discussed within the field of both more traditional Artificial Intelligence and the new trends of Artificial Life and robotics, be it behaviour-based or evolutionary. My aim in this talk is to lay out some of this history, and to present a framework of the main epistemological themes and open questions faced by recent research programs in the modelling of living organisms. 
Adaptive behavior appears in the interaction between a body, brain and the environment. Therefore, an experimental system for evaluating and understanding adaptive behavior requires a closed-loop system in which environmental information is fed back to an animal. This system must be capable of optionally manipulating the external environment, allowing the adaptive behavior to be manipulated.
Learning and adaptation capability of current robots are so limited and fragile.In order to discover sensible ways to act in the vast complexity of the real world, new principles should replace the classical combinatorics and parameter tuning; the principles of free exploration for emergent self-stabilizing patterns and its boot-strapping organization.
Jean Piaget saw cognitive development as the progressive differentiation of internal representations from sensory-motor processes. Like many contemporary cognitive scientists, he believed that advanced forms of cognition were those that were separate from the here-and-now of perceiving and acting. In this talk, I will present from infants and toddlers that the processes that enable them to keep track of objects and to learn their names is closely tied to sensory-motor processes but creates new forms of knowledge that transcend perception and action. A dynamic field model of the spatial representation of object location and object name learning that both explains the data and makes new empirical predictions will be used to make the case. 
