Humanoids 2012 Workshop on Developmental Robotics

Can developmental robotics yield human-like cognitive abilities?

Osaka, Japan, November 29th, 2012

Workshop will include a number of invited and contributed talks. The list of the confirmed distinguished speakers who lead the world-wide studies in developmental robotics and psychology is as follows: (in alphabetical order)

  • Dr. Minoru Asada is Professor of the department of Adaptive Machine Systems at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University (Suita, Japan). He received his Ph.D. in control engineering from Osaka University in 1982. Professor Asada was elected to and served as General Chair of the IEEE/RSJ 1996 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS96). Since early 1990, Professor Asada has been involved in RoboCup activities and his team was the inaugural champion (shared with USC), in the mid-sized league of the rst RoboCup competition held in conjunction with IJCAI-97 (Nagoya, Japan). Since 2002, Professor Asada has served as President of the International RoboCup Federation. In 2005, Professor Asada was elected Fellow of the IEEE for Contributions to Robot Learning and Applications. Also in 2005, Professor Asada was elected to serve as Research Director of the ASADA Synergistic Intelligence Project of ERATO (Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology) by the Japan Science and Technology Agency and he continued to serve as Research Director until the Project was completed in 2012. In 2007, Professor Asada was awarded The Okawa Publications Prize (The Okawa Foundation) and, in 2008, he received The Good Designs Award for VoCal-Vivid Oral Conversation through Acquiring Language (Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization) . In 2009, Professor Asada again received the Best Paper Award of the Robotics Society of Japan. And, in 2012, The Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) named Professor Asada to serve as Research Leader for the Specially Promoted Research Project (Tokusui) on Constructive Developmental Science Based on Understanding the Process From Neuro-Dynamics to Social Interaction.

  • Dr. Claes von Hofsten is a Full Professor of Psychology at the University of Oslo and the University of Uppsala. He received his PhD in psychology at Uppsala University in Sweden in 1973. Between 1998 and 2011 he was a professor in perception at Uppsala. He has spent several extended periods at American universities; as visiting professor at University of Minnesota and University of Virginia and as visiting scientist at MIT and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is also Honoris Causa at University of Normandy in France and honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr von Hofsten research interests are focused on the development of action in young children.

  • Dr. Giulio Sandini is director of Research at the Italian Institute of Technology and full professor of bioengineering at the University of Genoa. Main research activities are in the fields of computational and cognitive neuroscience and robotics with the objective of understanding the neural mechanisms of human sensory-motor coordination and cognitive development. After graduating in Electronic Engineering (Bioengineering) he was research fellow and assistant professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the Laboratorio di Neurofisiologia of the CNR where he investigated aspects of visual processing at the level of single neurons as well as aspects of visual perception in human adults and children. He has been Visiting Research Associate at the Department of Neurology of the Harvard Medical School and Visiting Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of MIT. Since July 2006 he has been appointed Director of Research at the Italian Institute of Technology where he has established and is currently directing the department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

  • Dr. Alexander Stoytchev is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of the Developmental Robotics Laboratory at Iowa State University, USA. He received his MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001 and 2007, respectively. His research interests are in the areas of developmental robotics, autonomous robotics, computational perception, and machine learning.

  • Dr. Jun Tani received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Waseda University, a dual M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a Dr. Eng. from Sophia University. He started his research career in Sony Computer Science Laboratory in 1990. He worked as a PI of the Lab. for Behavior and Dynamic Cognition, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN in Tokyo from 2001 to 2012. He also held the position of Visiting Associate Professor at the Univ. of Tokyo between 1997 and 2002. He became a full professor in Electrical Engineering Dept. in KAIST 2012 where he started cognitive neurorobotics. He is interested in neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology, complex adaptive systems, and robotics.

  • Dr. Ales Ude studied applied mathematics at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He received the Ph.D. degree for work on robot programming by demonstration from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He was an STA fellow in the Kawato Dynamic Brain Project, which was conducted at ATR in Kyoto, Japan. Currently he is the head of Humanoid and Cognitive Robotics Lab at Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia and is also associated with the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. His current research interests include learning in humanoid systems, especially imitation learning and learning by exploration, humanoid robot vision, and humanoid cognition.