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ACE 2006 - Agent Construction and Emotions - Final Call
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Modeling the Cognitive Antecedents and Consequences of Emotion
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****** submissions due on: November 30 ******
April 18-20, 2006
Vienna, Austria
Workshop Webpage: http://www.ofai.at/~paolo.petta/conf/ace2006/
Background
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This workshop seeks submissions exploring the argument that theories
of human emotion provide essential insight into the design and control
of intelligent entities in general. As computational models of
intelligence move beyond simple, static and nonsocial problem solving,
research must increasingly confront the challenge of how to allocate
and focus mental resources in the face of competing goals, disparate
and asynchronous mental functions, and a changing interpersonal and
physical environment. Contemporary psychological and neuroscience
research suggests that the emotions service such needs in biological
organisms and a functional analysis of emotion?s impact can profitably
inform the design of artificial organisms that must survive in a
dynamic, semi-predictable and social world. This workshop builds on a
series of prior workshops that seek to deepen and concretize this
claim.
Cognitive scientists have long argued that emotional influences that
seem irrational on the surface have important social and cognitive
functions that would be required by any intelligent system. For
example, Herb Simon theorized that emotions serve to interrupt normal
cognition when unattended goals require servicing. Robert Frank argues
that social emotions such as anger and guilt reflect a mechanism that
improves group utility by minimizing social conflicts, and thereby
explains people's "irrational" choices to cooperate in social games
such as the prisoner's dilemma. Similarly, Alfred Mele claims that
"emotional biases" such as wishful thinking reflect a rational
mechanism that more accurately accounts for social costs, such as the
cost of betrayal when a parent defends a child despite strong evidence
of their guilt in a crime. At the same time, findings on non-conscious
judgments (e.g., Bargh; Gollwitzer; Schwarz&Clore) have enriched our
understanding of how cognitive style is shaped by the socio-emotional
context, often in adaptive ways. More broadly, appraisal theorists
such as Lazarus, Frijda and Scherer have argued that emotions are
intimately connected with how organisms sense events, relate them to
internal needs (e.g., is this an opportunity or a threat?),
characterize appropriate responses (e.g., fight, flight or plan) and
recruit the cognitive, physical and social resources needed to
adaptively respond.
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in using such findings
to a wide array of computational problems including action selection,
resource allocation, multi-agent coordination and the management of
beliefs and intentions. The object of this workshop will be to
strengthen the growing interdisciplinary synthesis between
computational and psychological research on the role the emotions play
in modeling intelligent behavior.
Topics
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The workshop will explore the intersection of emotion theory and
intelligent system design, and the potential for this intersection to
improve our understanding of both human and artificial intelligence.
In particular, we seek to emphasize the interplay between emotion and
deep models of cognition in adaptively navigating complex physical and
social environments. This places an emphasis on psychological
paradigms that stress cognitive processes, such as appraisal theory,
computational systems that model the cognitive antecedents and
consequences of emotion, and research that models emotion-evoking
social and task environments.
Specific topics of interest include:
- Computational accounts of the connection between emotion and
cognitive processes (including planning, language processing,
interaction, perception, etc.)
- Theoretical accounts of the adaptive function of emotion processing
- Computational models that abstract the posited function of emotion
processing and illustrate an adaptive advantage over classical
theories in concrete domains (e.g. planning, decision making,
action selection, social coordination, etc.)
- Empirical research testing process assumptions of theories of human
emotion
- Empirical research illustrating the adaptive (or maladaptive) role
of emotions in human cognition
- The use of computational models or methods to evoke emotion in human
subjects
- Techniques for modeling emotionally evocative social or physical
environments (i.e., "emotional" extensions to cognitive task
analysis)
Organizing Committee
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- Jonathan Gratch, University of Southern California
- Stacy Marsella, University of Southern California
- Paolo Petta, Center for Brain Research, Medical University of Vienna
Program committee
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- Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University
- Lola Cañamero, University of Hertfordshire
- William J. Clancey, NASA Ames
- Gerald Clore, University of Virginia
- Cristina Conati, University of British Columbia
- Eva Hudlicka, Psychometrix Associates
- Susanne Kaiser, University of Geneva
- Tim Ketelaar, New Mexico State University
- Agnes Moors, Ghent University
- Josef Nerb, University of Freiburg
- Andrew Ortony, Northwestern University
- Ana Paiva, Instituto Superior Técnico
- Brian Parkinson, University of Oxford
- Rosalind Picard, MIT
- Rainer Reisenzein, University of Greifswald
- Fiorella de Rosis, University of Bari
- Matthias Scheutz, Notre Dame University
- Craig Smith, Vanderbilt University
- Niels Taatgen, University of Groningen
- Thomas Wehrle, University of Zurich
Submission Details
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The workshop is held in conjunction with the 18th European Meeting on
Cybernetics and Systems Research (http://www.osgk.ac.at/emcsr/).
Submissions will be due on *November 30, 2005*, must be
written in English and must not exceed 6 pages (10-point, double
column). Please refer to the home page of EMCSR 2006 for detailed
instructions on the formatting and submission procedures
Related Past Meetings
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- Architectures for Modeling Emotion: Cross-Disciplinary Foundations.
AAAI 2004 Spring Symposium Series, Stanford University, Palo Alto,
California, USA, March 22-24, 2004.
- ACE 2004
- Emotion, Evolution and Rationality, interdisciplinary conference
hosted by the Philosophy Department at King's College London.
Saturday 27 April - Sunday 28 April 2002.
- ACE 2002
- Symposium on Emotion, Cognition, and Affective Computing.
AISB'01 Convention, March 21-24, 2001.
- ACE 2000
- Autonomous Agents 1999 Workshops on Autonomy Control Software and on
Emotion-Based Agent Architectures (Seattle, WA, USA).
- Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition,
1998 AAAI Fall Symposium Series
- Grounding Emotions in Adaptive Systems at SAB'98,
Zurich, Switzerland.
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