Conference Description

The past decade has seen the emergence of a new scientific field that studies how intelligent biological and artificial systems develop sensorimotor, cognitive and social abilities, over extended periods of time, through dynamic interactions of their brain and body with their physical and social environments. This field lies at the intersection of a number of scientific and engineering disciplines including Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology, Developmental Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and Philosophy. Various terms have been associated with this new field such as Autonomous Mental Development, Epigenetic Robotics, Developmental Robotics, etc., and several scientific meetings have been established. The two most prominent conferences of this field, the International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) and the International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (EpiRob), are now joining forces and invite submissions for a joint meeting in 2011, to explore and extend the interdisciplinary boundaries of this field.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions for this exciting window into the future of developmental sciences. Submissions which establish novel links between brain, behavior and computation are particularly encouraged.

Topics of interest include – but are not limited to:
* The development and emergence of perceptual, motor, cognitive, emotional, social, and * communicational skills in biological systems and robots
* General principles of development and learning
* Neural and behavioral plasticity
* Grounding of knowledge and development of representations
* Biologically inspired architectures for cognitive development and open-ended development
* Models of emotionally driven behavior
* Mechanisms of intrinsic motivation, exploration and play
* Embodied cognition: Foundations and applications
* Social development in humans and robots
* Use of robots in applied settings such as autism therapy
* Epistemological approaches to Epigenetic / Developmental Robotics