Draft Agenda for the International Workshop on Natural and Artificial Cognition
Alex Kacelnik and Paul Cohen
May 21th, 2007
Our proposed agenda has two complementary parts: tool use as a specific instance of cognition in natural and artificial systems, and cognitive universals having to do with more abstract problems faced in both fields, such as the detection of causal relations, intentional states, learning, decision-making, and development. Throughout the workshop we will try to identify those aspects of cognition and those theoretical constructs that allow us to understand particular natural and artificial cognitive systems as points in a more general “tradeoff space.”
We propose organizing the workshop around twenty-to-thirty minute talks, leaving plenty of time for discussion. It is fine to talk about particular species and systems, but we encourage you to take advantage of the wide-ranging expertise of the delegates and try out your most general ideas, the ones you think might apply across species and systems. We probably will organize the talks into four or five sessions, as described below, and we hope to have one or two discussants for each session to get the conversation going. (If you want to be a discussant, please let us know.)Please those of you that feel can give a joint talk do let us know, as this would streamline the program.It would also be useful if you could send us tentative titles and, if possible, very brief descriptions of what you plan to talk about.
Tool Use
- Alex Weir (abstract)
- Christian Rutz (abstract)
- Rob St. Amant (abstract)
- Alex Stoytchev (abstract)
- Sabine Tebbich (abstract)
Universals I (Causality, Social factors, Development)
Universals II (Learning)
- John Taylor (abstract)
- Rod Grupen (abstract)
- Rich Sutton (abstract)
- Oliver Selfridge (abstract)
- Alex Kacelnik (abstract)
