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SGES Evening Lectures
Birkbeck College University of London
The Evening Lectures are free to both members and non-members of
SGES. Further information is available on the SGES website:
http://www.bcs-sges.org
or from Dr. Hui Liu, Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College
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Wednesday August 4th 1999 (6 p.m.)
Paul R. Cohen (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Tots and 'bots: The Development of Cognition
ABSTRACT
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.
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Max Bramer
Chairman, SGES
http://www.bcs-sges.org
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