The Enactive AI paper I wrote with Tom Ziemke, which has just been published in March, is #1 of ScienceDirect’s Top 25 Hottest Articles in Artificial Intelligence for the period January – March 2009!
News
June 26, 2009 at 5:03 pm (General)
As a result of the work I did for my D.Phil. thesis on “Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis: A study in evolutionary robotics” a batch of publications related to sociality will be published in the coming months:
- Froese, T. & Di Paolo, E. A. (forthcoming), “Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
- Froese, T. & Di Paolo, E. A. (forthcoming), “Modeling social interaction as perceptual crossing: An investigation into the dynamics of the interaction process”, Connection Science
- De Jaegher, H. & Froese, T. (forthcoming), “On the role of social interaction in individual agency”, Adaptive Behavior
- Froese, T. & Di Paolo, E. A. (forthcoming), “Toward Minimally Social Behavior: Social Psychology Meets Evolutionary Robotics”, in: Proc. of the 10th Euro. Conf. on Artificial Life, Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag
And, of course, I have not neglected my interested in the phenomenon of life:
- Virgo, N., Egbert, M. & Froese, T. (forthcoming), “The Role of the Spatial Boundary in Autopoiesis”, in: Proc. of the 10th Euro. Conf. on Artificial Life, Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag
I’ve also taken this as an opportunity to update the website a little bit. In particular, the Publications page is now sub-divided into different categories of papers, and I’ve created a new Presentations page that lists the talks, posters, and seminars separately. This means that the Academic CV page is now much less cluttered.
I will post separate announcements for the papers as they become available.
Artificial Embodiment: An integrative methodology for a science of consciousness
June 9, 2009 at 7:25 pm (Presentations)
This is my abstract for this year’s Ratna Ling conference on first-person methods.
Artificial Embodiment: An integrative methodology for a science of consciousness
Even today, 40 years after Bach-y-Rita’s seminal Nature paper on a tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS) system, no consensus can be reached on how best to interpret users’ verbal reports. Is the experience of using such sensory augmentation interfaces visual, tactile, cognitive, or something altogether new? The growing fascination with technological wizardry, i.e. the building of different and more advanced interfaces, is in itself unlikely to resolve such a foundational issue.
The lack of a principled methodology to make progress on this impasse can naturally be linked to another growing debate in the cognitive sciences, namely about the role of first- or second-person approaches for the scientific study of consciousness. The development and establishment of these approaches is encountering some difficulty in the face of a widespread skepticism inherited from the behaviorist tradition. In order for them to demonstrate their methodological validity it is especially important that they go beyond mere data collection, i.e. descriptions of experiential phenomena, and move into a more productive relationship with the rest of cognitive science.
Accordingly, we propose to address the distinct difficulties faced by phenomenological methodology and sensory augmentation research by relating these two growing areas of research in a mutually beneficial manner. The crucial step of moving beyond mere technological wizardry or data collection into a principled scientific research program is to link them together in terms of hypothesis generation and verification. We refer to this novel research program as Artificial Embodiment (AE). The basic methodology consists of four essential steps:
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News
June 9, 2009 at 7:20 pm (General)
It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update, so here it goes. Last week I finally handed in my thesis with the title “Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis: A study in evolutionary robotics”. The day after I traveled to Berlin for the Coma and Consciousness: Clinical, Societal and Ethical Implications workshop, a general meeting by the COST action on consciousness, and the annual conference of the Association for Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC-13). There is no doubt that the field of consciousness studies is buzzing indeed!
Tomorrow I’m leaving for the annual Ratna Ling conference on first-person approaches to consciousness studies in California, where I will be presenting a talk on what I have called “Artificial Embodiment”, an integrative methodology which combines first-person methods and minimalist enactive interfaces by means of hypothesis generation and verification. I’ll make a separate post for the talk’s abstract.
