Talks by Michael Tomasello

Author:movellan @ March 31st, 2009 Comments Off

The Cognitive Science Distinguished Speaker Series presents
Michael Tomasello, Ph.D.,
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Collaboration and Communication in Children and Chimpanzees
Monday, 6 April 2009, 4 – 6p
Center Hall 216

Human beings share many cognitive skills with their nearest primate relatives, especially those for dealing with the physical world of objects (and categories and quantities of objects) in space and their causal interrelations. But humans are in addition biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not. Specifically, humans have evolved unique motivations and cognitive skills for understanding other persons as cooperative agents with whom one can share emotions, experience, and collaborative actions (shared intentionality). These motivations and skills first emerge in human ontogeny at around one year of age, as infants begin to participate with other persons in various kinds of collaborative and joint attentional activities. Participation in such activities leads humans to construct during ontogeny perspectival and dialogical cognitive representations

Chimpanzee Social Cognition
Tuesday, 7 April 2009, 11a – 12:15p
SSB 107

After years of debate about whether chimpanzees do or do not have a “theory of mind”, recent research suggests that the question must be asked in a more differentiated way. Thus, there is currently very good evidence that chimpanzees understand that others have goals, and even intentions in the sense that actors choose a behavioral means to their goal in light of the constraints of the situation. Similarly, there is currently very good evidence that chimpanzees understand that others see things, and even know things (in the sense of having seen them previously). Nevertheless, despite several seemingly valid attempts, there is currently no evidence that chimpanzees understand false beliefs. Our conclusion for the moment is thus that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception–goal psychology, as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief–desire psychology.

Autism and AV Synchrony

Author:movellan @ March 29th, 2009 Comments Off

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20090329/autism-new-clue-to-earlier-detection

Omron Smile Scanner Product

Author:movellan @ March 26th, 2009 Comments Off

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/30/say-cheese-the-smile-scan-makes-grumpy-employees-friendlier/

Science Paper on the Ethical Issues of Robotics

Author:movellan @ March 17th, 2009 Comments Off

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/322/5909/1800

Josh Bogard Lecture on Evolutionary Robotics

Author:movellan @ March 16th, 2009 Comments Off

INC 2009 Rockwood Lecture

Josh Bongard

Department of Computer Science
Vermont Advanced Computing Center
University of Vermont

Friday, March 20, 2009 11 am
Cognitive Science Building, Room 003

Abstract:

Intelligent robots must be able to not only adapt an existing behavior on the fly in the
face of environmental perturbation, but must also be able to generate new, compensating
behavior after severe, unanticipated change such as body damage. In this talk I will
describe a physical robot with this latter capability, a capability we refer to as resiliency.
The robot achieves this by (1) creating an approximate simulation of itself;
(2) optimizing a controller using this simulator; (3) using the controller in reality;
(4) experiencing body damage; (5) indirectly inferring the damage and updating the simulator;
(6) re-optimizing a new controller in the altered simulator; and (7) executing this compensatory
controller in reality. I will also describe recent work generalizing this approach to robot teams.

Host: Terry Sejnowski

Unsigned Image Comparison in Matlab

Author:nick @ March 10th, 2009 Comments Off

I was recently doing something like the following in Matlab:

im1 = imread(‘im1.jpg’);

im2 = imread(‘im2.jpg’);

if sum((im1(:)-im2(:)).^2) < 1e-5, disp(‘Image 1 and 2 are duplicates!!!’), end

So the point of these three lines of code is to compare image 1 and image 2, and if they are sufficiently close (exactly or nearly exactly), call them duplicates.

The preceding code has an interesting non-obvious bug: For integer-valued jpgs, Matlab loads them as type uint8. The above test will be passed not only if all pixels are the same, but also if every pixel in im2 is brighter than every pixel in im1. This is because, with unsigned integers, 1-2 = 0.

So I had a very washed out image in my image set that was testing as a duplicate of many images, just because nearly all pixels in the saturated image were 255, and x-255=0 for all unsigned x.