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• Week 1 (January 8th) No seminar
• Week 2 (January 15th) Nick Collins (COGS/Informatics, Sussex): Generative Music Programs and Infno in Particular
• Week 3 (January 22nd) Tom Collett (COGS/Biology and Environmental Science, Sussex): The learning flights of bumblebees
• Week 4 (January 29th) Barry Smith (Philosophy, Birkbeck): Just What Can We Taste in a Wine?
• Week 5 (February 5th) Yvonne Rogers (Computing, Open University): Computers should Engage not Calm: A Critique of the Emerging Field of Ubiquitous Computing
• Week 6 (February 12th) Gabriel Segal (Philosophy, King's College London): When is a 'sofa' not a 'sofa'?
• Week 7 (February 19th) Daniel Wright (COGS/Psychology, Sussex): Eyewitness testimony and postevent information
• Week 8 (February 26th) John Williams (Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, Cambridge): Incidental learning of word order: Prior linguistic knowledge or statistics?
• Week 9 (March 4th) Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute, Philosophy, Oxford)
• Week 10 (March 11th) Raymond Tallis (Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester)

Week 1

Tuesday 8th of January, 2008

No seminar

Week 2

Tuesday 15th of January, 2008
Speaker: Dr. Nick Collins (COGS/Informatics, Sussex)

Generative Music Programs and Infno in Particular

Following on from Margaret Boden's seminar last term on generative art, I'd like to focus in on generative music programs. Algorithmic composition has a more than fifty year history, and contemporary digital artists are developing computer programs which offer realtime music and audio on demand, engaging with a range of musical styles and sonic domains. Various projects and manifestations will be discussed, from Push Button Bertha (1956) to the Morpheus CDROM (2001), from Brian Eno's Generative Music 1 installation (1996) to the rand()% internet radio station (2003) which streams generative works 24 hours a day when the server is up.

I will then introduce my latest work, Infno, an algorithmic generator of synth pop and electronic dance music, and run a miniature musical Turing test for fun. More extensive demonstrations and technical information on the algorithms will follow. There should be plenty of time for discussion and debate to close the seminar.

Week 3

Tuesday 22nd of January, 2008
Speaker: Prof. Thomas Collett (COGS/Biology and Environmental Science, Sussex)

The learning flights of bumblebees

Animals (including us) often know in advance what information they need to acquire about the external world and so can facilitate their learning through innate biases and strategies. Strategies for learning can be especially obvious during spatial learning when animals move in particular ways that are likely to help them pick up information that can be used for their later navigation. The highly structured learning flights that bees and wasps perform when first leaving their nest or a feeding site are well-known examples of such purpose-built manoeuvres. These insects must learn enough about the immediate surroundings of their nest on their first departure from it so that they can find their way back to what may be no more than a barely visible hole in the ground. Learning and the associated return flights have presumably been designed in tandem. To understand better their design features, we (Natalie Hempel, Andy Philippides, Lena Riabinina and I) have been analysing these flights in bumblebees.

Week 4

Tuesday 29th of January, 2008
Speaker: Dr Barry Smith (Philosophy, Birkbeck)

Just What Can We Taste in a Wine?

Wine critics claims to recognise a complex variety of flavours and aromas in a wine. Novices are often sceptical. What could account for the differences between novice and expert when both taste the same wine? Is it just that that the expert knows more about the wines, or is it that experts can taste things novices can't. If so, what accounts for the differences, and how do novices become experts?

Most wine tasters and many wine critics will also say that taste is subjective. It is a matter of what you like or dislike, of what is right for you. In matters of taste your opinion is sovereign. You should simply not allow yourself to be persuaded that you have not fully appreciated this or that wine: there is no such thing as getting it right or wrong. It is your opinion that counts. So oft-propounded is such wisdom that it is somewhat difficult for other views to get a hearing. However, a closer examination of the business of taste and tasting will show us that things are not so clear-cut. To begin with, the reasons people offer for saying that taste is subjective vary considerably and not all of them are compatible with each other. Moreover, the considerations most often advanced in favour of subjectivity are not always consistent with the attitudes or practices of those who advance them. (It is harder than one thinks to live up to the belief that taste is subjective.) In the end, so many different things come to be listed under the heading of subjectivity that one begins to suspect that there is no common view or single opinion about what it means to say that taste is subjective. In the light of this, just how convincing are the arguments for the subjectivity of taste? And if we can no longer give good reasons for endorsing subjectivity what should we say instead? In particular, what scope is there for thinking that there may be such a thing as the taste (or tastes) of a wine, and that judgments about taste may be objective? These are the issues I will explore.

This event will include participation in wine tasting by the audience.

Week 5

Tuesday 5th of February, 2008
Speaker: Prof. Yvonne Rogers (Computing, Open University)

Computers should Engage not Calm: A Critique of the Emerging Field of Ubiquitous Computing

The paradigm of ubiquitous computing, captured by the slogan 'beyond the desktop', is coming of age. Inspired by Weiser's vision of calm computing published in the mid 90s, subsequent research has been motivated to make our lives convenient, comfortable and informed. Three themes that have dominated are context awareness, ambient intelligence and monitoring/tracking. While these avenues of research have been fruitful, their accomplishments do not match up to anything like Weiser's world. I discuss why this is so and argue that it is time for a change of direction in the field. I begin by giving an overview of the field and then propose an alternative agenda that focuses on engaging and provoking people rather than calming them. Humans are very resourceful at exploiting their environments and extending their capabilities using existing strategies and tools. Using examples from my own research I describe how pervasive technologies can be added to the mix.

Week 6

Tuesday 12th of February, 2008
Speaker: Prof. Gabriel Segal (Philosophy, King's College London)

When is a 'sofa' not a 'sofa'?

A certain variety of externalism in theory of mind is the thesis that the content of certain concepts is essentially dependent on relations between a thinker and their environment.

The dependence is not merely causal, but metaphysically necessary. According to this thesis, two thinkers who were neurological and physical micro-structural duplicates could have different thoughts if they were embedded in different environments.

In his paper 'Intellectual Norms and the Foundations of Mind', Tyler Burge offers an argument for this sort of externalism. My paper offers an internalist response to Burge's argument. I argue that Burge's conclusion cannot be correct. I argue further that Burge's argument hinges on an incorrect understanding of they way ordinary discourse about propositional attitudes functions in certain kinds of situation that the argument draws upon. My account of the functioning of the discourse in these situations focuses, firstly, on the traditional distinction between de re and dicto propositional attitude ascriptions and, secondly, on a certain kind of flexibility and context-relativity displayed by propositional attitude ascriptions.

Week 7

Tuesday 19th of February, 2008
Speaker: Dr. Daniel Wright (COGS/Psychology, Sussex)

Eyewitness testimony and postevent information

Errant eyewitness identifications are the leading cause of false imprisonment. While the malleability of individuals' memory is part of the reason, biases from eyewitnesses interacting with others are also part at fault. Recent research on these biases are reported and how they informed the British Psychological Society's recommendations to the Home Office for reforming police procedures.

Week 8

Tuesday 26th of February, 2008
Speaker: Dr. John N. Williams (Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, Cambridge)

Incidental learning of word order: Prior linguistic knowledge or statistics?

Most experimental research on grammar learning has used artificial finite state grammars devoid of meaning. Some of the questions addressed by this research are:

- What is the nature of what is learned (e.g., abstract representations or fragments of training items)?

- To what extent is either the process or product of learning implicit?

- How can the learning process be modelled?

In this talk I shall address these same issues in the context of research on semi-artificial systems based on natural languages. In this context an additional question is:

- To what extent is learning influenced by prior linguistic knowledge, or even Universal Grammar?

The experiments looked at incidental learning of word order regularities after either 30 or 60 minutes of exposure to novel, but meaningful, languages (based on either German or Japanese). English lexis was combined with German or Japanese syntax (and for the latter, case markers), producing strings such as "John-ga pizza-o ate". Comparisons were made with meaningless analogues of the same systems (e.g. "So-ga po-o ke") in order to gauge the contribution of linguistic knowledge and meaning to learning. In both cases learning was assessed through grammaticality judgements on novel strings, supplemented with confidence and source judgements to assess awareness.

The results from the meaningful versions provided strong evidence for rapid incidental learning of structures received in training. There was evidence of learning certain generalisable "rules of thumb", but these did not correspond to linguistic rules, and learning did not appear to be UG-constrained. Even though participants had no intention to learn word order, they were nevertheless aware of the basis of their grammaticality judgements. The meaningless analogues produced broadly similar results, although some test structures did behave very differently in the two versions, indicating specific contributions of linguistic knowledge and meaning.

It is hypothesised that in both versions learning was based on the statistical structure of the training strings. This hypothesis was explored through connectionist simulations using simple recurrent networks. These provided an excellent fit to the data from the meaningless analogues, and a good fit to the meaningful versions provided that the coding scheme was chosen so as to reflect the linguistic categories and meaning structure that the participants were likely to impose on the input. It is concluded that the initial incidental learning of word order can be explained in terms of statistical learning, and that linguistic knowledge is only engaged to the extent that it defines the categories over which statistics are computed.

Week 9

Tuesday 4th of March, 2008
Speaker: Dr. Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute, Philosophy, Oxford)

Enhancing cognition: what we can do, why we can do it and whether it is a good idea

de la Rochefoucauld noted, "everybody complains of their memory, but nobody of their judgement" - but most likely we would at least surreptitiously improve our judgement if we could. The possibility of improving our abilities of memory, thinking and judgement has a strong appeal. Until recently this aim was mainly pursued through various forms of education, but now advances in neuroscience and computer science are enabling new ways of enhancing cognition. This raises great expectations of overcoming some of our limitations but also much debate about the ethics, politics and practice of enhancement. I will review some of the state-of-the-art enhancements that are being studied and their mechanisms, as well as how evolutionary biology can help us figure out what enhancements are likely to cause trouble.

Week 10

Tuesday 11th of March, 2008
Speaker: Prof. Raymond Tallis (University of Manchester)

Myth-Information: The Computational Theory of Mind

The computational theory of mind has created the delusion of progress in understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind. Computers are not conscious, nor will they be. Consciousness is not computational. The most important aspect of mind is consciousness. The mythology of computational theories is sustained by misuse of the word "information"'. We need to seek an entirely different paradigm for thinking about the relationship between brain and mind.

Series organized by Simon Bowes (s.c.bowes@sussex.ac.uk) 

Autumn Term 2007

• Week 1 (October 2nd) Margaret Boden (COGS/Informatics, º£½ÇÉçÇø): What is Generative Art?
• Week 2 (October 9th) Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd. and Visiting Research Fellow, Sussex): The Long Road from Text to Meaning
• Week 3 (October 16th) No seminar
• Week 4 (October 23rd) Graham Hole (COGS/Psychology, º£½ÇÉçÇø): In-vehicle information systems - giving drivers something to occupy them before they crash
• Week 5 (October 30th) Roxana Baiasu (Philosophy, º£½ÇÉçÇø): The Spatiality of Human Embodiment
• Week 6 (November 6th) Steve Torrance (COGS; University of Middlesex): Machine Ethics and Moral Agency: Warfare as a case study
• Week 7 (November 13th) Jessica Horst (COGS; Psychology, º£½ÇÉçÇø): The Truth About Fast Mapping
• Week 8 (November 20th) No seminar
• Week 9 (November 27th) Aaron Sloman (COGS; University of Birmingham): Why symbol-grounding is both impossible and unnecessary, and why theory-tethering is more powerful anyway.
• Week 10 (December 4th) No seminar

Week 1

Tuesday 2nd of October
Speaker: Margaret Boden (COGS/Informatics, º£½ÇÉçÇø)

What is Generative Art?

There are various forms of what's sometimes called generative art, or computer art. This paper distinguishes the major categories, and asks whether the appropriate aesthetic criteria--and the locus of creativity--are the same in each case.

Week 2

Tuesday 9th of October, 2007
Speaker: Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd. and Visiting Research Fellow, Sussex)

The Long Road from Text to Meaning

Computers have given us a new way of thinking about language. Given a large sample of language, or corpus, and computational tools to process it, we can approach language as physicists approach forces and chemists approach chemicals. This approach is noteworthy for missing out what, from a language-user's point of view, is important about a piece of language: its meaning.

I shall present this empiricist approach to the study of language and show how, as we develop accurate tools for lemmatisation, part-of-speech tagging and parsing, we move from the raw input -- a character stream -- to an analysis of that stream in increasingly rich terms: words, lemmas, grammatical structures, Fillmore-style frames. Each step on the journey builds on a large corpus accurately analysed at the previous levels. A distributional thesaurus provides generalisations about lexical behaviour which can then feed into an analysis at the 'frames' level. The talk will be illustrated with work done within the 'Sketch Engine' tool.

For much NLP and linguistic theory, meaning is a given. Thus formal semantics assumes meanings for words, in order to address questions of how they combine, and WSD (word sense disambiguation) typically takes a set of meanings (as found in a dictionary) as a starting point and sets itself the challenge of identifying which meaning applies. But, since the birth of philosophy, meaning has been problematic. In our approach meaning is an eventual output of the research programme, not an input.

Week 3

Tuesday 16th of October, 2007

No Seminar

Week 4

Tuesday 23rd of October, 2007
Speaker: Graham Hole (COGS/Psychology, º£½ÇÉçÇø)

In-vehicle information systems - giving drivers something to occupy them before they crash

Cars are becoming steadily filled with more and more technology: at the moment drivers have mobile phones and sat-nav systems to play with, but within the next few years, internet and email access on the move will become commonplace. Telematics is big business, and companies like Microsoft are keen to help turn the car into a mobile office. The premise is that as long as a driver's hands are on the steering wheel, and their eyes are on the road, everything will be fine. I'll review psychological research, including studies done here at Sussex, which suggest that this is not the case, and that distracting drivers from what should be their primary task of safe driving is a really bad idea.

Week 5

Tuesday 30th of October, 2007
Speaker: Roxana Baiasu (Philosophy, º£½ÇÉçÇø)

The Spatiality of Human Embodiment

This talk is part of a broader project which develops a phenomenological approach to most basic features constitutive of our making sense of the world and of ourselves. Here I critically engage with certain ideas concerning embodied existence in space in Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception and in Heidegger's Being and Time.
Following Merleau-Ponty in his delimitation from Heidegger, I endorse his view that embodiment is a necessary, constitutive feature of our making sense of the world and of ourselves. One's own body is understood here in terms of what I refer to as its distinctive ownness and, at the same time, givenness.
I propose, however, a conception of the spatiality of embodiment, developed in terms of a notion of spatial dissemination, which challenges Merleau-Ponty's radical prioritising of the body.

Week 6

Tuesday 6th of November, 2007
Speaker: Steve Torrance (COGS; University of Middlesex)

Machine Ethics and Moral Agency: Warfare as a case study

Machine Ethics (Anderson et al 2005, 2006; Torrance 2008) is a growing field which takes account of how artificial agents, including decision support systems, robots, control systems, etc., are increasingly implicated in situations which raise deep moral issues (for example in medicine, vehicle navigation, combat, social care, public policy, etc.) Machine ethicists try to find ways to make the design of such systems more morally responsible, and, if possible, to directly embed moral responsibility in the agents themselves. In this talk I'll be examining some of the issues in the field.

A recent discussion of machine ethics in the context of autonomous weapon systems (AWSs) highlights how such systems are currently being deployed by the US Army in live operations (e.g. in Iraq) and how AWSs are likely to proliferate rapidly in future armed engagements (Sparrow, 2007). This discussion provides a useful case study for examining how far it could be appropriate to ascribe moral agency to AI systems.

This will be used as a backdrop to a discussion of various views in ethical psychology and phenomenology that rule out the possibility of genuine moral agency or responsibility in currently envisaged artificial agents. I will focus on a recent paper by Shaun Gallagher (2007) which is a critique of views of moral agency and expertise proposed by Hubert Dreyfus, Harry Collins, Carol Gilligan and others. Gallagher's neo-Aristotelian conception of moral agency is based on the capacity for phronesis (practical wisdom). This picture of moral personhood centres on conceptions of 'endogenous intersubjectivity' and embedded self-consciousness that have roots in recent neurological, developmental and phenomenological studies.

Moral agency, defined in such a rich way, is unlikely to be found in artificial agents - certainly if the latter are designed using methods currently available. While machine-based moral agency is marginal to Gallagher's discussion, I will suggest that his views readily support this negative conclusion about machine ethics. However, this conclusion ignores the moral imperative to embed ethical responsibility into AI and robot development: I will explore some ways in which this might be done.

• Anderson M, Anderson S, Armen C (eds) (2005) Machine Ethics: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium. Technical report FS-05-06, Menlo Pk, CA: AAAI Press
• Anderson, M., Anderson, S. (eds) (2006) Special Issue on Machine Ethics: IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(4)
• Gallagher, S. (2007). Moral Agency, Self-Consciousness and Practical Wisdom Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(5-6)
• Sparrow, R (2007) Killer Robots. Journal of Applied Philosophy. 24(1) 62-77 Available (currently) online at http://wiley-blackwell.msgfocus.com/c/11rqP2Ti1Z7Fg6n1tY
• Torrance, S (ed) (2008) Special Issue on Ethics and Artificial Agents: Artificial Intelligence and Society, forthcoming.

Week 7

Tuesday 13th of November, 2007
Speaker: Jessica Horst (COGS; Psychology, Sussex)

The Truth About Fast Mapping

Children's rapid acquisition of word meaning is often attributed to fast mapping. However, recent research suggests that fast mapping and word learning represent two distinct components of language acquisition. In this talk, these recent data will be presented and the Probabilistic Constraint Satisfaction/Associative Learning Perspective, which provides a developmental explanation for children's fast mapping and word learning behaviour, will be introduced. Both empirical research with 24-month-old children and simulations from a dynamic connectionist network (Hebbian Normalized Recurrence Network) will be discussed. The research will cover (1) what the child learns during the fast mapping task, (2) how this relates to word learning (3) how specifics of the task influence children's ability to map novel names to novel objects and known names to known objects and (4) how the Probabilistic Constraint Satisfaction/Associative Learning can account for new data that other perspectives in the literature are unable to explain.

Week 8

Tuesday 20th of November, 2007

No Seminar

Week 9

Tuesday 27th of November, 2007
Speaker: Aaron Sloman (COGS; University of Birmingham)

Why symbol-grounding is both impossible and unnecessary, and why theory-tethering is more powerful anyway.

The idea of an axiom system having some models is explained more fully than in previous presentations, showing how the structure of a theory can give some semantic content to undefined symbols in that theory, making it unnecessary for all meanings to be derived bottom up from (grounded in) sensory experience, or sensory-motor contingencies. Although symbols need not be grounded, since they are mostly defined by the theory in which they are used, the theory does need to be "tethered", if is capable of being used for predicting and explaining things that happen, or making plans for acting in the real world. These ideas were quite well developed by 20th Century philosophers of science, and I now both attempt to generalise those ideas to be applicable to theories expressed using non-logical representations (e.g. maps, diagrams, working models, etc.) and begin to show how they can be used in explaining how a baby or a robot, can develop new concepts that have some semantic content but are not definable in terms of previously understood concepts. There is still much work to be done, but what needs to be done to explain how intelligent robots might work, and how humans and other intelligent animals learn about the environment, is very different from most of what is going on in robotics and in child and animal psychology.

Week 10

Tuesday 4th of December, 2007

No Seminar

Series organized by Simon Bowes (s.c.bowes@sussex.ac.uk)

Summer Term 2007

• Week 1 (17 April) Chris Thornton (COGS/Informatics, º£½ÇÉçÇø) Can information theory provide the foundation for a theoretical cognitive science?
• Week 2 (24 April) Professor Manuel de Vega (Department of Psychology, University of La Laguna, Spain) What do you understand when you understand a counterfactual sentence?
• Week 3 (1 May) Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL) The Social Brain
• Week 4 (8 May): Kheng Lee Koay (Adaptive Systems Research Group, University of Hertfordshire) Human-Robot Interaction Experiments for a Robot Companion
• Week 5 (15 May) Professor Mohan Matthen (Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto) How Things Look (And What Things Look That Way)
• Week 6 (22 May) Professor Dominic McIver Lopes (Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia) Live Wires: Outline of a Philosophy of Computer Art
• Week 7 (29 May) Anil Seth (Department of Informatics, º£½ÇÉçÇø) Causal Networks in Neural Systems: Explorations with Brain-Based Devices
• Week 8 (5 June) Professor Stephen Laurence (Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield) Number in the Mind
• Week 9 (12 June) Ron Chrisley (COGS, º£½ÇÉçÇø) Synthetic Phenomenology: Using robots to specify the content of experience
• Week 10 (19 June) Padraic Monaghan (Department of Psychology, University of York) Arbitrariness in form-meaning mappings: Why we don't say what we mean

Week 1

Tuesday 17th of April
Speaker: Chris Thornton (COGS/Informatics, º£½ÇÉçÇø)

Can information theory provide the foundation for a theoretical cognitive science?

Largely an empirical discipline, cognitive science tends to emphasise the building of models. But could there be a `theoretical cognitive science' and if so what would it look like? One possibility is that it would be based on information theory, a branch of mathematics which like cognitive science is concerned with interpretation. But there are difficulties of the `syntax v. semantics' variety. The talk will combine some general pondering on this issue with an introduction to an approach I've been exploring recently.

Week 2

Tuesday 24th of April, 2007
Speaker: Professor Manuel de Vega (Department of Psychology, University of La Laguna)

What do you understand when you understand a counterfactual sentence?

When you understand a counterfactual expression such as "If Mary had won the lottery, she would have bought a Mercedes car" you should be able to consider for a while an "as if" scenario in which Mary actually won the lottery and she bought a Mercedes car. But, in addition, you must be aware that such scenario is fictitious, and that in the real world Mary is still as poor as used to be. In other words, counterfactuals have a dual meaning.

Although the role of counterfactuals has been explored by deductive reasoning and social psychology students, the study of counterfactual comprehension has been comparatively neglected by psycholinguistics and discourse researches. I will present several studies run in our laboratory that compare the comprehension of factual and counterfactual materials. They have shown that: 1) Counterfactuals embedded in texts cancel updating processes; 2) Counterfactuals generate two situation models that coexist momentarily; 3) Counterfactuals could activate embodied representations in spite of their "abstract" meaning; and 4) Counterfactuals differ from factual contents in their ERP signature at several moments during sentence comprehension.

Week 3

Tuesday 1st of May 2007
Speaker: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL)

The Social Brain

The brain has evolved to deal with social interaction and we are increasingly learning more about the brain basis of social cognition. I will discuss recent studies on the mirror system and mentalising in healthy adults and in autism. Parts of the social brain undergo dramatic development during adolescence, and I will describe recent studies that have investigated the development of mentalising during this period of life.

Week 4

Tuesday 8th of May, 2007 at 4:00 pm until 5:30 pm
Location: Pevensey 1A1
Speaker: Kheng Lee Koay (Adaptive Systems Research Group, University of Hertfordshire)

Human-Robot Interaction Experiments for a Robot Companion

Robots are integrating into our society with an increasing rate. Besides used in industry, they are also developed to do useful tasks in domestic environments; as such it is important that robots are able to interact with humans in ways that humans find comfortable, in order to seamlessly integrate robots into human-centered social environments and contexts. Research carried out at the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire (UH), investigates dimensions of appropriate robot behaviour when fulfilling the possible roles which robots may play in domestic environments. More specifically looking at the robot as a companion i.e. fulfilling two important functions: a) making itself 'useful' by being able to carry out a variety of tasks in order to assist humans in a domestic home environment, and b) behaving 'socially', possessing social skills in order to be able to interact with people in an acceptable manner. A personalized robot companion should take into consideration individual human's likes, dislikes and preferences and adapt its behaviour accordingly. Our initial focus is to understand the relationship between robot behaviour and user preferences in order to make the human-robot interaction socially acceptable. Currently, we are focusing on the relationships between robot appearances, proxemic/spatial preferences within different interaction contexts.

In this presentation, we will present results from Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies that investigate the issues of participants' preferences in terms of the robot approach direction, robot base-approach interaction-distance, robot handing-over-hand distance, robot handing-over-arm gesture, and the coordination of both the robot approach and possible handing-over-arm gestures, in the context of a robot handing over an object to a seated person. The results from this study are used to inform the development of a Human Aware Manipulation Planner, developed by one of our partners in the Integrated European Framework 6 project COGNIRON. This particular trial was performed as part of a long-term HRI study; comparisons can be drawn between the participants' preferences expressed in this and those in other trials - and can be related to the specific interaction contexts.

Results show that a majority of the participants would prefer the robot to approach them from the front, and hand them an object in the front sector of their personal zone. The robot handing-over-hand position has the most influence on determining the approach direction of the robot. Differences between participant preferences in the current trials and those exhibited in previous trials suggest that legibility and perception of risk seem to be the deciding factors on how participants choose their preferred robot arm-base approach coordination for handing over an object.

Week 5

Tuesday 15th of May, 2007
Speaker: Professor Mohan Matthen (Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto)

How Things Look (And What Things Look That Way)

What colour does a white wall look in the pinkish light of the late afternoon? What shape does a round table look when viewed as you stand next to it? Philosophers have offered many different answers to these questions. Some say that the wall looks white, the table circular; some say that the wall looks pink, the table elliptical. A third camp says that these objects look both ways, and yet another that they look neither. In this paper, I seek to offer a framework within which these disputes can be resolved empirically. I'll re-examine the phenomenon known as 'perceptual constancy', and argue that it is not properly formulated as such. A reformulation, which I entitle the "Scene Parsing Thesis", leads me to the proposal that the visual features in a scene are predicated of a plurality of things present in it. This helps me arrive at a novel view about the subjective phenomena that underlie the dispute outlined at the start.

Week 6

Tuesday 22nd of May, 2007
Speaker: Professor Dominic McIver Lopes (Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia)

Live Wires: Outline of a Philosophy of Computer Art

Scholars have a unique opportunity to attend the birth of a new art form - computer art. The distinctive feature of this art form is that it is interactive. A correct understanding of interactivity and a true appreciation of its significance requires the right definition, the right conception of the ontological status of computer art works, and the right picture of what activities go into making and using works of computer art. Touching on each of these points also corrects some misconceptions about the value of computer art.

Week 7

Tuesday 29th of May, 2007
Speaker: Anil Seth (Department of Informatics, º£½ÇÉçÇø)

Causal Networks in Neural Systems: Explorations with Brain-Based Devices

Neurons engage in causal interactions with one another and with the surrounding body and environment. Neural systems can therefore be analyzed in terms of causal networks, without assumptions about information processing, neural coding, and the like. In this talk, I will describe the analysis of causal networks in simulated neural systems - "brain-based devices" - using a combination of time-series analysis ("Granger causality") and network theory. I will draw implications for possible causal pathways in the hippocampus and for the relation between synaptic plasticity and behavioral learning. I will explore the idea that learning involves the selection of specific causal pathways from diverse repertoires of neuronal interactions, resulting in dynamic "causal cores" that drive behavior. Finally, I will suggest how a simple extension of Granger causality might be used to measure autonomy.

Week 8

Tuesday 5th of June, 2007
Speaker: Professor Stephen Laurence (Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield)

Number in the Mind

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the psychology of basic numerical abilities. One of the central issues in this area is the nature and acquisition of concepts for positive integers. In the talk I sketch a new model of the acquisition of such concepts, contrasting my account with others in the literature, and addressing some potential objections to the account.

Week 9

Tuesday 12th of June, 2007
Speaker: Ron Chrisley (COGS, º£½ÇÉçÇø)

Synthetic Phenomenology: Using robots to specify the content of experience

Explanations of, or appealing to, specific experiential events require a new means of specifying the contents of experience; not all of them can be specified in a straightforward manner using everyday language. One proposal, at least for the case of visual experience, is to use depictions. These can either evoke (recreate in the recipient), or refer to, the content of the experience to be specified. Practical considerations concerning the generation and integration of such depictions argue in favour of a synthetic approach: the generation of depictions through the use of an embodied, perceiving and acting agent, either virtual or real. This is a case of what I call "synthetic phenomenology": the attempt to use the states, interactions and capacities of an artificial agent for the purpose of specifying the content of experience. This talk discusses work with Joel Parthemore on the SEER-3 project: techniques for visualizing the state of a robotic model of the visual experience of a hypothetical simple organism in a way that specifies the non-conceptual content of the modelled visual experience. If possible, a demonstration will be given of the robotic system and the real-time generation of depictive specifications of the experience it models.

Week 10

Tuesday 19th of June, 2007
Speaker: Padraic Monaghan (Department of Psychology, University of York)

Arbitrariness in form-meaning mappings: Why we don't say what we mean

Saussure noted that the mapping between the sounds of words and their meanings was arbitrary in human languages. I discuss some computational models that indicate why arbitrariness, generally difficult to learn, is an optimal system for assisting in learning language. However, arbitrariness is not complete - there is systematicity in natural language, in that there are morphological and phonological indicators to a word's usage. I show that arbitrariness and systematicity are both consistent with theories of learnability and that they can coexist in a language.

Series organized by Dustin Stokes

Spring Term 2007