Posted on behalf of Xiaohui Liu, Department of Computer Science,
Birkbeck College.
Dear Colleague,
BCS SGES Evening Lecture in Computer Science at Birkbeck
Wednesday 4th August, 6.00 pm, Room 124, North Block of Senate House
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Professor Paul R. Cohen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Title: Tots and 'bots: The Development of Cognition
The minds of adults and infants are so different that it is hard to
imagine
how one could develop from the other. Infants are sensorimotor agents
that lack conceptual systems, symbolic representations, and the ability
to
reason. How do these abilities develop? We ask the same question of
mobile robots, which have rudimentary sensors, effectors and reflex-like
actions, but no cognitive abilities. As minimalists, we try not to
"build in" the cognitive structures we are trying to explain, relying
instead on entirely
unsupervised learning algorithms to provide our robots with concepts
that
represent activities and objects. (All these algorithms find structure
in
multivariate time series, so they have been applied more generally to
problems in temporal data mining.) Currently the robots are able to
learn
activities and activity boundaries; sensorimotor prototypes and
primitive
ontologies; and they have learned to identify words in speech and the
denotations of the words. Even so, the robots' representations lack
attributes that they will need to learn human language. Much of our
current work is concerned with learning more compositional, denoting
representations.
Paul Cohen is Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. His PhD is from Stanford University (1983)
where
he edited the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence with Avron Barr and
Edward A. Feigenbaum. Cohen's research focuses on learning and other
statistical methods, planning, simulation, and the development of robot
minds. His publications and research projects are described at
eksl-www.cs.umass.edu/~cohen.
Wednesday 4th August, 6.00 pm, Room 124, North Block of Senate House
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Please pass on this information to any members of staff, postgraduates
and others in your department who might be interested in attending.
The room is on the first floor of the North Block, Senate House
of London University, Malet Street, London WC1, and NOT in the
main college building. Please do not take the lift since it does
not stop on the first floor. Entry to the Computer Science Department
is controlled by a security lock. To gain access, phone extension
6700, or 6711.
A map of the area is available on the web side "http://www.bbk.ac.uk".
Click "college map" on the left column. Location 9 is the North Block
of Senate House.
Thanks,
Xiaohui Liu Tel: (+44) 171 631 6711
Department of Computer Science Fax: (+44) 171 631 6727
Birkbeck College, Malet Street Email: [log in to unmask]
London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom WWW:
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~hui/
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