The Third International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL'04) Developing Social Brains

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
La Jolla, California, October 20-22 2004


The goal of the conference is to bring together leading researchers in neuroscience, machine learning, robotics, and developmental psychology, in order to gain new insights about learning and development in natural organisms and robots. The scope of developmental processes to be considered is broad, including cognitive, social, emotional, and many other skills exhibited by humans, and other animals. The theme of the conference this year will be "Developing Social Brains", but other topics related to development and learning are welcome.
Despite the strides being made in each discipline, further interactions across disciplines will serve to accelerate progress. For example, developmental psychologists can benefit from an understanding of the computational problems underlying the creation of machines that can perceive and interact with humans in the real world. Researchers in robotics can learn from the way biological systems balance learning and innate predispositions during development. Machine learning and machine perception can provide a framework to help neuroscientists understand neural dynamics and neural mechanisms underlying learning and development.
ICDL-04 is the second regularly scheduled conference following the ICDL-02 conference celebrated at MIT June 12-15 2002. The origin of these conferences traces back to the Workshop on Development and Learning (WDL), funded by NSF and  DARPA, held April 5 - 7, 2000 at Michigan State University (http://www.cse.msu.edu/dl). Some discussion about this new direction is  available on the final report page of WDL. A brief discussion of the subject   is available in an article appeared in Science
available electronically at   http://www.cse.msu.edu/dl/SciencePaper.pdf.

The subjects of the conference include, but not limited to:

Architectures for autonomous development and learning.
Neural plasticity during development.
Communication Robots.
Development of visual, auditory and other sensory cortices.
Learning to Interact with Humans.
Neural Basis of Social Development.
Modulatory and value systems.
Emotion.
Social Resonance.
Development of Interaction Schema.
Coordination and integration of behaviors throughout development.
Development of attention mechanisms.
Skill acquisition.
Robots capable of autonomous mental development.
Social and philosophical issues.
Computational and Robotic models of developmental disorders.
Statistical Structure of Nonverbal Communication
Robots and Animated Agents for Clinical Intervention

Program

Selected papers will appear in Neurocomputing, Special Issue on Development and Learning, 2007.  Editors: Gedeon Deak, Tony Jebara, Marian Bartlett.

Organizing Committee

General Chair:

Javier R. Movellan

University of California San Diego

 

General Co-Chairs:

Andrea Chiba

University of California San Diego

Gedeon Deak

University of California San Diego

Jochen Triesch

University of California San Diego

Marian Stewart Bartlett

University of California San Diego

 

Program Chairs:

Jochen Triesch

University of California San Diego

Tony Jebara

Columbia University

 

Program Co-Chairs:

Marian Stewart Bartlett

University of California San Diego

Gwen Ford Littlewort

University of California San Diego

 

Communications Chair:

Andrea Chiba

University of California San Diego

 

Publications Chair:

Gedeon Deak

University of California San Diego