It has long been known that having the appropriate knowledge structures is the
key to creating successful intelligent systems; this was demonstrated with
early expert systems in the 1970s and 80s, and continues in modern applications
using ontologies, and is also exploited by successful robotic systems which can
tackle everyday tasks. However, it is also well recognized that requiring human
knowledge engineers to create all the knowledge structures is not feasible for
unconstrained everyday domains.

It will be necessary for robotic systems to be able to bootstrap the creation
of their own knowledge structures. Psychology research on human development
suggests that there is significant innate knowledge in human infants, but that
there is also a complex interplay between this innate structure and the
environmental input during the development of an individual’s knowledge. It
is surmised that children may generate increasingly advanced concepts from
innate conceptual primitives by means of developmental mechanisms.

The motivation of the workshop is to present recent work on methods that can
bootstrap the creation of knowledge structures (on all levels of abstraction),
both in human development and in robotics.

Presenters
Rich Sutton, Department of Computing Science,University of Alberta, USA
Justus Piater, Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Ales Ude, Department of Automatics, Biocybernetics and Robotics, Jožef Stefan
Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Kerstin Fischer, Institut for Design og Kommunikation, Alsion 2, 6400
Sønderborg, Denmark
Florentin Worgotter, Department for Computational Neuroscience ,
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany
Yiannis Aloimonos, Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland, USA
Angelo Cangelosi, School of Computing and Mathematics University of Plymouth,
UK
Mark Steedman, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Frank Guerin, Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen
Giulio Sandini, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Robotics, Brain and
Cognitive Sciences, Genova, Italy

Organizers
Norbert Kruger, Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute , University of Southern
Denmark, norbert@mmmi.sdu.dk
Frank Guerin, Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen,
f.guerin@abdn.ac.uk
Tamim Asfour, Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
(KIT), asfour@kit.edu
Mark Steedman, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh,
steedman@inf.ed.ac.uk