Summer School Series

CITEC Summer School 2013:

On the topic of

Continuous learning in living and artificial systems

is planned to take place on 9-13 September 2013 at CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany.

Abstract: Continuous learning in living and artificial systems

In contrast to living organisms gaining knowledge continuously to adapt to a changing environment, artificial systems typically learn in a non-continuous way during a limited period of time. In fact, most artificial systems learn in batch mode, being heavily pre-trained to react to a set of previously specified situations. It is the developer of artificial systems who decides when learning starts and stops.
In the 3rd CITEC Summer School, our goal is to understand better the principles of continuous, incremental and life-long development from the point of view of different disciplines including but not limited to: biology, psychology, linguistics and computer science.
The summer school will bring together internationally experts from these field to discuss the principles of learning in living systems and how these principles can inform the design and development of adaptive and flexible artificial systems that learn continuously and in an incremental way over longer periods of time.
We offer keynote talks by the internationally renowned experts and free discussions with them lead by CITEC-groups’ leader working in the area of memory and learning. Furthermore, CITEC scientific and industrial partners will join us to provide a broader view on continuous learning and how it can be and is already implemented in current approaches for building new technologies.

Retrosprective -
CITEC Summer School 2012:

Verbal and non-verbal interaction: From experiments to implementation
was taking place 27-31 August 2012 at CITEC.

Guest Speakers

Abstract

Humans, as well as animal, artificial, or human-virtual agents are continuously confronted with the problem of understanding. What are the mechanisms that shape communicative behavior, what makes it so efficient in natural environments, and what are the keys for the improvement of it in artificial contexts? Dialogue coordination (alignment) in normal and noisy environments, intention understanding (pragmatic and joint attention), non-verbal cues (gestures and facial expressions decoding), and asymmetric communication are some common challenges for interactive systems, and they require efficient verbal and non-verbal mechanisms. The CITEC Summer School 2012 will focus on such mechanisms from the perspective of experimental psychology, computational modeling, gestures studies, animal communication and human-machine interactions, and will offer keynote lectures and discussions with world-renowned experts in these fields, along with hands-on tutorial streams for deepening and practicing theoretical notions and experimental skills.