Call for Papers and Participation:

General Chair and Local Organizer:

Program Chairs:

SCOPE OF SYMPOSIUM

In humans, other primates, dolphins, corvid, parrots, and other species interaction and social complexity have evolved that exploit mechanisms of recognition of particular individuals, life-long learning, autobiographical and interaction memory, development of social relationships, and complex forms of social learning and communication. Other animals exhibit interactive signaling systems (e.g. affect, threat and courtship displays), whereas within multicellular organisms and insect societies the substrates of interactions exploit chemical and stigmergic signals, or cell-type and caste roles.

This EPSRC symposium is part of series that follows upon the growing awareness from academia, industry, and research communities of the importance of evolvability, tentatively defined as, the capacity of populations to vary robustly and adaptively over time or generations in constructed and natural systems. The symposium aims to encourage a dialogue between various research workers in areas that might benefit from a possible common framework addressing interactive systems as well as evolvability concerns.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

• evolution of evolvability in populations of interacting individuals
• animal social complexity
• the behaviour of communicating and signaling
• affordances and ecologies of interaction
• animal social networks and kinds of social minds
• evolvability issues in computation and interaction
• evolution of cognition and interaction
• perception and recognition of others
• emergence of higher-level phenomena through interaction
• cultural evolution, social learning and imitation
• interaction among social robots
• swarm intelligence, self-organization and stigmergy
• minimal architectures for social robotics
• dynamics in robot-human interaction
• cognitive constraints and the evolution of social behaviour
• intersubjectivity and intention reading in interaction
• development of long-term interactive relationships
• interaction histories and autobiographic memory
• evolution of signaling and communication
• expression in interaction
• social grounding of referential behaviour and language
• Machiavellian Intelligence
• systems and dynamical approaches to evolvability and interaction
• predictive models of evolvability in social settings
• development and dynamics of interaction
• development and differentiation in evolving populations (differentiated multicellularity, social caste systems, etc.)
• others

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Evolution of Communication:

Irene Pepperberg, MIT & Brandeis Univesity, USA, (social learning and communication in parrots)

Robin Dunbar, University of Liverpool, UK, (grooming, cognition, and communication in primates)

Robotics:

Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Hertfordshire, UK, (social robotics and social intelligence in AI)

Tomio Watanabe, Okayama Prefectural University, Japan, (dynamics in man-machine interaction)

Dario Floreano, EPFL, Switzerland, (evolutionary robotics)

Yoshihiro Miyake, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, (co-creation in interaction)

Auke Jan Ijspeert, EPFL, Switzerland, (neural models, evolvability of behaviour, humanoid imitation)

Evolvability of Interaction Networks:

Pau Fernández, ICREA - Complex Systems Lab, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain (interaction networks, small worlds)

Dynamics of Evolvability:

Richard E. Michod, University of Arizona, USA, (evolution of individuality, cooperation, sex, Darwinian dynamics)

Takashi Ikegami, University of Tokyo, Japan, (evolutionary dynamics of interaction)

Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, University of Hertfordshire, U.K., (evolvability and social learning)

Animal Learning in Societies:

Lars Chittka, Queen Mary, UK, (sensory physiology, learning and evolutionary ecology)

and others to be confirmed.

FOLLOW UP PUBLICATION:

PARTICIPATION:

There is no registration fee. Participation is open to researchers and post-graduate students working in relevant areas. Please send an email to the general chair Peter McOwan (pmco@dcs.qmul.ac.uk) if you would like to attend without submitting a poster or talk.

Partial or full support of reasonable expenses is available for members of the Evolvability network and also UK-based postgraduate students who are presenting a paper or poster. Please inquire via email to C.L.Nehaniv@herts.ac.uk.

SUBMISSION OF CONTRIBUTED TALKS AND POSTERS:

Symposium URL: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/EN/EVOINTER.html