First Cognitive Sciences Talk at Southampton University

You are invited to the first in a new double series of colloquia in Cognitive Science, hosted by the Cognitive Psychology Research Group at the University of Southampton. There will be both an External and an Internal Speaker Series. Our first speaker (External) is a Neural Net Theorist from the Bolyai Institute of Mathematics in Hungary. His talk will take place this Tuesday, 11 October, in the Murray Lecture Theater, Southampton University, from 12:45 - 13:45. AUTONOMOUS ADAPTIVE AGENTS: GENERALIZED DYNAMIC CONCEPTS Dr. Csaba Szepesvari Bolyai Institute of Mathematics University of Szeged Szeged, Hungary szepes(a)inf.u-szeged.hu SUMMARY A brain-based alternative to reinforcement learning integrates artificial neural networks (ANN) and knowledge based (KB) systems into one unit or agent for goal-oriented problem solving. The agent works under closed-loop control. Its sensory system provides the input to the controller and the controller's output results in the agent's immediate motor actions. The controller can have both inherited and learned ANN and KB systems. The agent has and develops ANN cues to the environment for dimensionality reduction (data compression) in order to ease the problem of combinatorial explosion. A dynamic conceptual model (DCM) builds cue-models of the phenomena in the world, designs dynamic action sets and makes them compete at a spreading-activation neuronal stage to come to a decision. DCM can create concepts or subgoals. For the production of subgoals two things are important: (i) DCM has an inherited goal system and (ii) subgoals are created by the agent's experiences encountered during the interaction with the environment. Concepts allow the use of rule-based systems for control. The agent's experiences transform during learning into a rule system. Concept generation reduces memory and time requirements. It also improves the system's ability to handle unknown situations. We examine the capabilities of a simple robotic-like object in a two-dimensional conditionally probabilistic space. Date: Tuesday, October 11 Time: 12:45 - 13:45 Place: Murray Lecture Theater, Murray Building Cognitive Scientists at University of Southampton are invited to present their work to their fellow cogntive scientists in the Internal Speaker Series. If you wish to speak, or to recommend someone to speak, please contact Professor Stevan Harnad, Psychology Department, Murray Building 206, harnad(a)soton.ac.uk The Cognitive Sciences include: Psychology, Neurobiology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Machine Vision/Speech, Neurocomputation, Linguistics, and subareas of Biology, Anthropology, Sociology, Archeology, Philosophy, and further disciplines. The common element uniting the Cognitive Sciences is a research interest in how the mind -- and systems that can do what mind the can do -- work. Dr. Szepesvari will be here from Monday to Thursday and would be very interested in visiting SU labs doing related work (neural nets, parallel computation, cogntive systems, robotics/automomous agents, control systems, AI, vision/speech, etc. Please let me know if you would be interested in having the speaker visit your lab. Stevan Harnad Professor of Psychology Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk harnad(a)princeton.edu phone: +44 703 592582 -------------------------------------------------------------------- ftp://princeton.edu/pub/harnad/ http://louis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:9000/1