UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
            COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

        "On Informational Principles of Embodied Cognition"

                       Dr.  Daniel Polani
               (University of Hertfordshire, UK)

                    6 October 2010  (Wednesday)
                       Lecture Theatre A161

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                                 1 -2  pm


                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

For many decades, Artificial Intelligence adopted a platonic view that
intelligent behaviour is produced in the "brain" only and any body is
only an incidental translator from thought to action. With the
celebrated work of Rodney Brooks and Rolf Pfeifer, this view has
changed to acknowledge the central importance of the body and the
perception-action loop as whole in helping an organisms' brain to
carry out useful ("intelligent") behaviours. The key word for this
phenomenon has been dubbed "environmental/morphological computation"
(Paul 2006; Pfeifer and Bongard 2007).

The question arises, how exactly does this work? What are the
principles that make environmental computation work and how can the
contribution that the body provides to cognition be characterized
objectively?

It turns out that the language of Information Theory provides a
natural quantitative language to characterize cognition, cognitive
invariants as well as the contribution of the embodiment to the
cognitive process. The talk will review the current state-of-the-art
in the field and provide some - sometimes quite surprising -
illustrations of the power of the informational view of cognition.


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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq