The AISB'2000 Convention was held at the University of Birmingham on Monday April 17 to Thursday April 20.
For information about the remaining symposia and their times, see the main Convention web page: http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb00/index.html
The invited keynote speakers for the main Convention are Alan Bundy, Geoffrey Hinton, Marvin Minsky, and Aaron Sloman. Some of their talks will be relevant to this symposium. Marvin Minsky and Geoffrey Hinton will also attend this symposium.
Much research in psychology is equally fragmented: investigating particular capabilities and how they are affected by environmental factors, or brain damage, or gender, or age, etc.; for instance linguistic or visual or problem solving or memory or motor control capabilities.
Moreover such research often produces interesting empirical results without leading to a theory that is deep or precise enough to be the basis for a design for a working system.
Some philosophers also think about these topics and attempt to analyse the concepts involved in talking about minds, or necessary or sufficient conditions for various kinds of mentality, but without doing so at a level that might guide an engineer attempting to design a mind: and some of them produce arguments claiming to show that the task is impossible, but without formulating the arguments in a manner that could convince a computer engineer.
Ethologists study the minds of many kinds of animals and how they differ, but often without asking what sorts of architectural differences might underly the observed differences in behavioural capabilities, social structure, etc.
Biologists and paleontologists study the evolution of systems which include humans and other animals but generally find it much easier to investigate the development of physical form and physical capabilities than the mechanisms of mind.
Researchers in any discipline are invited to submit posters which address these issues, whether in a speculative fashion or by reporting firm results which directly contribute to the long term task. Examples of topics might be proposed include: architectures to accommodate multiple aspects of human mental functioning, or analyses of requirements for such architectures, or a critique of existing architectures on the basis of their functional limitations or inconsistent empirical evidence, or discussions of how important aspects of human minds might have evolved, or analysis of the problems of designing an adult mind vs designing an infant mind which develops into an adult mind, or comparisons between capabilities of different animals which provide evidence for architectural differences, or overviews of major results in neuroscience which have implications for the virtual machine architecture of a mind (e.g. evidence from brain-damaged patients indicating what sorts of separable functional modules exist).
Philosophical posters presenting familiar arguments to prove that the task is impossible are not particularly welcome whereas philosophical arguments which highlight some of the difficulties to be overcome are.
The symposium will consist of four main half-day sessions followed by a concluding session. Each of the four main sessions will be composed of a set of half hour presentations of selected papers followed by a half hour (or longer) discussion period led by a member of the organising committee. There will also be sessions for poster presentations. The talk by David Lodge, will be on the first afternoon.
The final session of the symposium (Tuesday afternoon) will be a discussion session aiming to identify achievements of the symposium and important unsolved problems which are worth addressing in the near future. It may be useful also to discuss future events of the same kind.
There will be poster presentation sessions organised concurrently for the whole AISB Convention, bringing members of the different symposia together.
Poster submissions welcome until 4th February 2000
POSTER PROPOSALS:
Format for submission of poster proposals.
All submissions to be emailed to: A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
with "Subject:" line: AISB2000 Symposium Poster
with the following contents IN THIS ORDER PLEASE, and please do not
expect A.Sloman to supply missing bits!
Please RETAIN THESE HEADINGS in your submission:
1. AUTHORS' names:
Affiliation and address:
Email address:
Phone number:
(If there is more than one author the first author will be the
corresponding author.)
2. TITLE OF POSTER
3. ABSTRACT:
(Preferably no more than 500 words).
4. SHORT CV:
Provide a short CV for the main author or authors, including lists of
recent journal or conference publications or invited talks, and current
research activity.
Please note:
ONLY plain text submissions will be accepted at this stage, and only by
email.
Do NOT send MS-Word files. If possible, do not send mime-encoded attachments, which will add to the effort involved in processing the submissions.
Do not send duplicate plain text and HTML messages.
DECISIONS:
Successful poster proposers will be notified towards the end of
February, in time to prepare their posters. A subset may be invited to
submit short papers to be included in the symposium booklet.
NOTE: there may not be facilities to support video presentations at the poster session, but if you wish to bring a portable computer, it may be possible to run demonstrations for small groups.
Information on formatting accepted papers and poster summaries
There will be a booklet of contributions to the symposium distributed at
the conference. For those presenting full papers (9 pages) and summaries
of posters (2 pages) the formatting instructions are at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/aisb/formatting.html
This symposium is sponsored by the Artificial Intelligence panel of the AI professional group of IEE
The conference is in the Arts Building at the University of Birmingham, not in the School of Computer Science. It's building 28 on the Campus Map. Here are some online information files and maps:
How to find the University: overview
Short cuts (links may no longer work):
We envisage all the posters being up for the entire symposium in the Mason lounge (where coffee is served) but with the poster presenters on hand during coffee breaks and after each day of the poster's symposium.
Access times for pinning up posters will be announced shortly.
