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

Announcements

  • ICDL 2004 Proceedings: PDF *Revised Edition*

  • ICDL 2004 Budget

  • Directions, Maps and Parking Instructions

  • Recreational Activities and Restaurants

  • Program now available

  • Printer Friendly Version of the Program (PDF)

  • Internet Connections: Wireless and cable ethernet will be available for free to registrants.

  • Poster Size: The total area available for your poster is 8 feet (~2.4 meters) horizontally by 4 feet (~1.2 meters) vertically. This area is made of up 2 adjacent 4 feet by 4 feet foam core boards, to which the poster can be attached with regular thumbtacks.

  • 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 througout 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