From Animals to Robots and Back:
reflections on hard problems in the study of cognition
A Symposium in Honour of Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
12-13 September 2011
Online Proceedings
Online proceedings of the Symposium are now available.
Introduction
In this symposium held in Aaron's honour, we will look reflectively at topics in the study of cognition that have cover a (hopefully large) subset of Aaron's long term interests. These cover studies and thoughts about people, other animals, and robots. Both in terms of what problems they are, or could solve, what requirements there are to solve those problems, and how they might be solved in practice. The meeting will bring together a range of speakers who have worked with Aaron in the past, or are working with him now. Non-speakers are welcome to attend, and there will be a short poster session for those who wish on Monday.
We cannot pay for travel or accommodation, but we can recommend hotels at which to stay locally. We also have to charge a small fee to cover the costs of catering. Note that registration has now closed.
If you have any queries about the symposium in terms of practical arrangements please mail: Katie Helliwell, cogx-administrator@cs.bham.ac.uk .
Programme
Monday 12 Sept
- 10.30 Coffee and Registration - Computer Science Building, University of Birmingham.
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Symposium sessions and Coffee will be held in Mechanical Engineering. Symposium sessions are in G31. Coffee is in the Shell Lounge. Mechanical Engineering is building Y3 on the campus map.
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11.15 Welcome
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Session 1: 11.30-1.15
- Aaron Sloman: Talk Title TBC
- Dean Petters - Loss of control arising from public passions and hidden agendas
- Jackie Chappell - Acting on the world: understanding how agents represent the world to guide their action
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1.15-2.15 Lunch & poster session (Computer Science Atrium)
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Session 2: 2.15 -3.30
- Matthias Scheutz - Virtual Machines: Non-Reductionist Bridges between the Functional and the Physical
- Brian Logan - What does it mean to have an architecture?
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3.30 Coffee and Tea
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Session 3: 4.00-5.15
- Nick Hawes - Building for the future: Architectures for the next generation of intelligent robots
- Jeremy Baxter - Combining planning and action, lessons from robots and the natural world
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7.00 Dinner at the Marriott Hotel, Five Ways.
Tuesday 13 Sept
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Session 4: 9.00-10.45
- Michael Zillich - What vision can, can't and should do.
- David Hogg - Reasoning in vision
- Jeremy Wyatt - The rocky road from Hume to Kant: correlations and theories in robots and animals
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10.45 Tea and Coffee
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Session 5: 11.15-1.00
- Luc Beaudoin - Experts' productive learning from Formal Knowledge: Motive Generators and Productive Practice
- Tom Khabaza - From Cognitive Science to Data Mining, the First Intelligence Amplifier
- Tim Read -- Modelling User Linguistic Competences for Individual and Collaborative Planning
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1.00-2.00 Lunch (Computer Science Atrium)
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Session 6: 2.00-3.15
- Ian Wright - Loop closing semantics and the origin of intentional states
- Rick Cooper and John Fox - A canonical approach to the organization of mind
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3.15 Coffee
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Session 7: 3.45-5.30
- 3.45 David Lodge - Secret Thoughts. Read by David Lodge and Stephanie Dale.
- 4.30 Aaron Sloman: response and closing remarks
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5.00 Close
Directions
Directions to Computer Science can be found here.
Proceedings
Hard copies of the proceedings were distributed at the symposium, but in the interests of making the proceedings freely available they are now available on-line .
Last updated by Jeremy Wyatt, 16 January 2012