Autonomous Mental Development Technical Committee (AMDTC) Chair: Matthew Schlesinger Vice-Chairs: Yukie Nagai Erol Sahin June 2014

Autonomous Mental Development

Technical Committee (AMDTC)

Chair: Matthew Schlesinger

Vice-Chairs: Yukie Nagai

Erol Sahin

June 2014

AMDTC Members

2013 November 2014 June

78 Members 47 Members

North America: 22 North America: 14

Latin America: 1 Latin America: 0

Europe: 37 Europe: 27

Africa: 0 Africa: 0

Asia: 16 Asia: 6

Oceania: 2 Oceania: 0

Male: 63, Female: 15 Male: 37, Female: 10Members from Industry: 6 Members from Industry: 3

New Members: 10 (-27) New Members: 0 (-30)

AMDTC Main Conference Statistics

Year Location Attendance Accepted /Submitted Oral Poster SS1 Work-

shops Tutorials Comp2

06 Bloomington 93/110 (84%) 41 51 7 3 607 London 59/105 (56%) 31 28 308 Monterey 113 59/120 (49%)09 Shanghai 55/71 (77%) 1 210 Ann Arbor 117 54/81 (67%) 4411 Frankfurt 144 100/119 (84%) 25 75 5 212 San Diego 112 61/91 (65%) 22 39+51 5 113 Osaka 123 54/77 (70%) 21 33 3 3

14 Genoa

15 Providence

16 Paris

ICDL: IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (with EpiRob since 2011)

Plans for 2015 and 2016: A formal proposal for ICDL-EpiRob 2015 was submitted to the CIS in June 2014, to be hosted at Providence, Rhode Island. For 2016, Paris has been nominated, and the onsite organizing committee is being formed.

Notes on 2012 acceptance rate:65% = 61 out of 91 full paper submissions (22 talks, 39 posters)Other 51 accepted as 2-page abstracts (19 submitted as 2-page only)

ICDL-Epirob 2014

October 13th-16th

Genoa, ITALY

1 day workshop/tutorials2½ days main

conference(Mon-Thu)

General Chairs:Giorgio Metta (IIT, Genoa)Mark Lee (Univ. of Aberystwyth)Ian Fasel (Univ. of Arizona) Bridge Chairs:Giulio Sandini (IIT, Genoa)Masako Myowa-Yamakoshi (Univ. Kyoto) Program Chairs:Lorenzo Natale (IIT, Genoa)Hideki Kozima, not confirmed Publications Chairs:Francesco Nori (IIT, Genoa)Erol Sahin (METU, Ankara) Publicity Chairs:Katrin Lohan (Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh)Gordon Cheng (TUM, Munich) Local chairs:Alessandra Sciutti (IIT, Genoa)Vadim Tikhanoff (IIT, Genoa) Finance chairs:Andrea Derito (IIT, Genoa)

ICDL-EpiRob 2014

The Doge's Palace (Italian: Palazzo Ducale) is a historical building in Genoa. Once the home of the Doges of Genoa, it is now a museum and a center for cultural events and arts exhibitions. It is situated in the heart of the city

ICDL-EpiRob 2014

ICDL-Epirob 2015

August 13th-16th

Brown UniversityProvidence, RI, USA

1 day workshops/tutorials2½ days main conference

(Thu-Sun)

General Chairs:Matthew Schlesinger (Southern Illinois University)Dima Amso (Brown University) Bridge Chairs:Jeffrey Krichmar (U.C. Irvine)Bertram Malle (Brown University) Program Chairs:Clemént Moulin-Frier (INRIA)Lisa Meeden (Swarthmore) not confirmed Publications Chairs:Anne Warlaumont (U.C. Merced) Publicity Chairs:Lola Canamero (University of Hertfordshire)Matthias Rolf (Bielefeld University) not confirmed Local chairs:Thomas Serre (Brown University)David Sobel (Brown University) Finance chair:TBA

ICDL-EpiRob 2015

March 9th, 2015, paper submission deadlineMay 15th, 2015, author notificationJuly 1st, 2015, final version (camera ready) dueAugust 13th-16th, 2015, conference

ICDL-EpiRob 2015

Providence (RI) is home to several museums, including the RISD Museum, part of the famed Rhode Island School of Design; the John Brown House Museum, a landmark from the 18th century; and the Governor Henry Lippitt House Museum, an American National Historic Landmark. Theaters, galleries, outdoor adventures and more make Providence a place to get up and go. Providence's signature event is WaterFire, an award-winning fire sculpture installation on the three rivers in downtown Providence.

ICDL-EpiRob 2015

ICDL-EpiRob 2016

• Organizers in Paris have accepted the

nomination and are preparing the

proposal

Highlights/Plans for 2014

• WCCI-IJCNN 2014• AMDTC Special Session on

“Cognition and Development”

• ICDL-EpiRob 2014 (Genoa)

• New Book• Cangelosi A. & Schlesinger M. (2014).

Developmental Robotics: From Babies to Robots.

Cambridge MA: MIT Press

1. Reduced size of TFs:

- from 77 (2013) to 47 (2014) members

2. Individual TF webpages designed/launched

2. Support TAMD journal

- Special Issues, Outstanding Award

3. Continue integration of ICDL and EpiRob communities

- Genoa = 4th joint meeting

- Establish a joint Governing Body

4. TC name change

- Recommendations/report from ad-hoc committee

TC Chair’s Plan in 2014

1. TC Name change• Discuss recommendations of ad-hoc committee

2. Conference• Joint ICDL-EpiRob to continue with Providence 2015• Merging of ICDL GB and EpiRob Steering

3. IEEE TAMD• State and update on new impact factor• Best Paper Prize

4. AMDTC TFs• Reassess number, size, and productivity of TFs

Agenda 2014 TC Meeting

To be conducted at the October 2014 Conference (Genoa)

AMDTC Task Forces

TF Name Chair

Action and Perception Jun Tani

AMD Newsletter Piere-Yves Oudeyer

Developmental Psychology Thomas R. Shultz

Education Katherina Rohlfing

Human-Robot Interaction Tony Belpaeme

Language and Cognition Katerina Pastra

Robotics Minoru Asada

Web Presence TBA

Task Force Report for June 2014 (1/1)

Action and Perception

Chair: Jun Tani (Korea)Vice-Chair(s): Giorgio Metta (Italy)Members:

Bruno Lara (Spain) Gordon Chen (German)Erhan Oztop (Turkey)Stefano Nolfi (Italy)Tetsuya Ogata (Japan)Jochen Triesch (German)

Albert Ali Salah (Turkey)

Activities in the first half of 2014

1. The iCub workshop at ICRA in Hong Kong in June 2014 organized by Giorgio Metta was supported by the technical committee.

2. Jochen Triesch and his colleagues are organizing the 19th Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience, which will be held in Frankfurt, Germany during August 3-30.


TF Newsletter

Chair: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (France) (chair and editor)Members:

Fabien Bénureau (France) (associate editor)

Activities in 2014:• Two issues of the Newsletter (Spring and Fall)

• Each newsletter contains the following section: Editorial, Message from the AMD TC Chair, Dialog (and Dialog initiation for next issue), Reports of AMD related conferences/workshops, Call for papers and participation, Table of contents of IEEE TAMD articles (with abstracts)

• A central piece of the newsletter is the dialog column. The editor solicits a well-known researcher to propose a dialog on a topic of interdisciplinary interest to the AMD community, and then solicits answers from key relevant researchers.

• The Newsletter is sent electronically to around 1500 researchers (AMD mailing list), and available in open-access on the internet.


TF Newsletter

Fall 2013 dialog: Initiation by Peter Ford Dominey: How are Grammatical Constructions Linked to Embodied Meaning Representations?

Discussants: Brian McWhinney, W. Croft, A. Knott, M. Arbib and V. Barres, J. Weng

http://www.cse.msu.edu/amdtc/amdnl/AMDNL-V10-N2.pdf

Spring 2014 dialog:Initiation by Katerian Pastra: Autonomous Acquisition of Sensorimotor Experiences: Any Role for Language?

Discussants: Rick Dale, Katharina Rohlfing, Katrin Lohan, Benjamin Koch, Alessandra Sciutti, Gary Lupyan, Catriona Silvey, Kerstin Fisher, Emmanuel Dupoux

https://www.dropbox.com/s/trfrsn4tg54hq4r/amd_newsletter.pdf

http://www.cse.msu.edu/amdtc/amdnl/AMDNL-V10-N2.pdf

https://www.dropbox.com/s/trfrsn4tg54hq4r/amd_newsletter.pdf


Developmental Psychology

Chair: Thomas R. Shultz Deputy Chair: Denis Mareschal

Members:Gedeon O. Deák Brian Scassellati Matthew SchlesingerSylvain Sirois Linda B. Smith John P. SpencerMichael Thomas Jochen Triesch Kim Plunkett Gert Westermann

Activities in 2014:

1. Linda Smith and colleagues published these paper covering robotic models of child development phenomena.

Oudeyer, P., & Smith, L.B. (in press) How Evolution may work through Curiosity-driven Developmental Process. Topics in Cognitive Science.

Grzyb, B. J., Del Pobil, A. P., & Smith, L. B. (2012). How walking influences the development of absolute distance perception. In From Animals to Animats 12 (pp. 65-74). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.


Developmental Psychology

Chair: Thomas R. Shultz Deputy Chair: Denis Mareschal

Members:Gedeon O. Deák Brian Scassellati Matthew SchlesingerSylvain Sirois Linda B. Smith John P. SpencerMichael Thomas Jochen Triesch Kim Plunkett Gert Westermann

Activities in 2014:

Those two papers will be part of planned workshop, "Pathways of Cognitive Development" workshop at ICDL/EpiRob in Genoa.

2. Together with Minoru Asada and Matthias Rolf, Matthew Schlesinger and Jochen Triesch are organizing a pre-conference workshop entitled "Computational Models of Infant Development“ on July 2, 2014. It will be co-located with the ICIS conference in Berlin. For details see: http://www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/icis2014-preconference/

http://www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/icis2014-preconference/

http://www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/icis2014-preconference/


TF Education Chair: Katharina J. Rohlfing (Germany)Vice-Chair(s): Vadim Tikhanoff (Italy)Members:

Gustaf Gredebäck (Sweden)Juyang Weng (USA)Chen Yu (USA)Jun Tani (South Korea)Yulia Sandamirskaya (Germany)

Activities in 2014 for IEEE Education:

1. Dialogue initiation „Trained on everything“: Discussion about interdisciplinary education

2. Virtual courses in Developmental Robotics with experts planned for Fall 2014


TF Education (2) Dialogue initiation TAMD Newsletter:Discussion on interdisciplinary education is initiated in the current TAMD Newsletter

Virtual class room:Currently:

Syllabus for virtual seminar

Soliciting teachers / experts and testing software for live courses within the virtual classroom

Advertizing virtual seminar at the ICDL 2014

Fall 2014:

First virtual seminar in Developmental Robotics


TF Human-Robot InteractionChair: Tony Belpaeme (UK)Members:

Stevo Bozinovski (USA)Kerstin Fischer (Denmark)Verena hafner (Germany)Yukie Nagai (Japan)Brian Scassellati (USA)


1. TF member Brian Scassellati is co-chairing the Cognitive Science conference in 2014. The conference pans a joint robotics exhibition that spans both Cognitive Science and AAAI (which is co-located).

2. The TF was intensely involved in the organisation and the directing of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. HRI2013 (Tokyo, Japan, 3-6 March 2013) and HRI2014 (Bielefeld, Germany, 3-6 March 2014). http://humanrobotinteraction.org





3. TF member Yukie Nagai organized the Workshop on "HRI: a bridge between Robotics and Neuroscience" at HRI2014. The goal of the workshop was to bridge the gap between HRI studies and cognitive modelling and developmental modelling studies.

4. TF member Verena Hafner co-organised the German-Israeli Minerva School on Cognitive Robotics, February 24-27, 2014 in Berlin, Germany (http://minerva2014.de) and the Dagstuhl Seminar on Spatial Reference in the Semantic Web and in Robotics, March 31-April 4, 2014 at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany (http://www.dagstuhl.de/de/programm/kalender/semhp/?semnr=14142).





5. TF chair Belpaeme gave a lecture series on “Cognition, Social Interaction and Cognitive Robots”at the Interdisciplinar College (IK2014, Germany, http://www.interdisciplinary-college.de/).

6. TF member Hafner presented at the Workshop on „Attention Models in Robotics: Visual Systems for Better HRI“, HRI2014, Bielefeld, Germany (March 3, 2014). )

7. TF member Fischer will publish a book on “Designing Speech for a Recipient” in which she analyses the mechanisms of formulating for a particular communication partner by comparing speech to children, to foreigners and to robots.

Task Force Report for June 2014 (1/3)Language & Embodied Cognition

Chair: Katerina Pastra (CSRI, Greece)Vice-Chair(s): Nikolaos Mavridis (New York Uni., United Arab Emirates)

Members:Yiannis Aloimonos (U. Maryland - Cognitive Vision, USA) Jean-Christophe Baille (Aldebaran Robotics – Language Learning, France)Anna Borghi (U. Bologna - Language and Embodied Cognition, Italy) Angelo Cangelosi (U. Plymouth – Language-Action Learning, U.K.)Daniel Casasanto (Max Planck Inst. Psycholinguistics - Language& Metaphor, Netherlands) Stephen Cowley (U. Hertfordshire – Distributed Language Perspective, U.K.) Stefano Nolfi (CNR - Robotics and Language, Italy) Katharina Rohlfing (U. Bielefeld - Language meaning development, Germany) Yulia Sandamirskaya (U.Bochum – Theory of Cognitive Systems, Germany) Stephanie Tellex (MIT - Human Robot Interaction and Language, USA)

Email Address of the group: [email protected]


Activities in first semester 2014 for IEEE Language & Cognition:

1. Organisation of a Symposium in AISB 2014 entitled: “Embodied vs. Simulated Behaviour and Cognition: What could Robotics contribute to

Language Sciences?” Organisers: K. Pastra, S. Cowley, N. MavridisInvited Speakers: Prof. Roger Moore (Univ. Sheffield) and Prof. Paul Vogt (Univ.

Tilburg)http://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/128-aisb50-embosim.html

2. Organisation of a Tutorial in LREC 2014 entitled:“When Semantic Language Resources meet Cognitive Systems”Tutor: K. Pastrahttp://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/129-lrec2014-semcog.html

http://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/128-aisb50-embosim.html

http://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/128-aisb50-embosim.html

http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/

http://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/129-lrec2014-semcog.html

http://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/129-lrec2014-semcog.html


Activities in first semester 2014 for IEEE Language & Cognition:

3. IEEE CIS-AMD Newsletter Dialogue Initiation (published in Fall 2013 with replies in Spring 2014) :

“Autonomous Acquisition of Sensorimotor Experiences: Any role for Language?”Initiator: K. PastraReplies by: R. Dale (Uni. Of California), E. Dupoux (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en

Sciences Sociales), K. Fischer (Uni. Of Southern Denmark), G. Lupyan (Uni. Of Wisconsin-Madison), K. Rohlfing (Uni. Of Bielefeld) and C. Silvey (Uni. Of Edinburg)

http://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/130-ieee-cis-amd-dialogue.html

http://www.csri.gr/index.php/en/news/130-ieee-cis-amd-dialogue.html


TF RoboticsChair: Minoru Asada (Japan)Vice-Chair(s): Giorgio Metta (Italy)Members:

Luc Berthouze (UK)Gordon Cheng (Germany)Yiannis Demiris (UK)Hiroshi Ishiguro (Japan)Yasuo Kuniyoshi (Japan)Tetsuya Ogata (Japan)Rolf Pfeifer (Switzerland)

Activities in 2014 for Robotics:

1. Giorgio Metta and Giulio Sandini (Robotics TF) will organize ICDL-EpiRob 2014 in Genoa during October 13 – 16, 2014.

2. Hiroshi Ishiguro, Rolf Pfeifer, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi (Robotics TF) will organize

a workshop on Cognitive Neuroscience Robotics (tentative) during ICDL-EpiRob 2014.

Documents

Autonomous Mental Development Technical Committee (AMDTC) Chair: Matthew Schlesinger Vice-Chairs: Yukie Nagai Erol Sahin June 2014