Interdisciplinary College 2007 March 9, 2007

The Interdisciplinary College (IK) is an annual one-week spring school which offers a dense, intensive and state-of-the-art course program in neurobiology, neural computation, cognitive science/psychology, artificial intelligence, robotics and philosophy. It is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers from academia and industry. By combining humanities, science and technology, the IK endeavours to intensify dialogue and connectedness between the various disciplines. Participants come mainly from European countries, lecturers from all over the world. Courses include up-to-date introductions to the four main fields of the IK, as well as in-depth discussions of focus topics. Additionally, the IK is a unique social event: In the evenings participants may enjoy the very special atmosphere: minds meet, music is played, and friends are made in long evening and night sessions in the welcoming conference site at the Lake Möhne.

The focus theme of this IK will be “Embodied Minds”. How would an intelligent agent solve a jigsaw puzzle? One solution is to memorize all parts, mentally rotate them in all possible ways, and match them with one another. This is the solution of abstract thought and is not found in nature, where intelligent brains are parts of complex bodies situated in their local environments. The solution of embodied thought would instead be to equip the agent with eyes and arms, and to continuously compute a myriad of feedback adjustments while actively exploiting the environment such that the parts move and slide into places. This example demonstrates one aspect of our contemporary understanding of how intelligent behaviour can emerge in biological or artificial systems. It is evolving as a consequence of today’s converging results and conclusions from artificial intelligence, robotics, neuroscience, and psychology. In this view of “embodied minds”, mental action and body performance are not distinct realms. Instead, the body and the environment, including others agents, are actively involved in the processing loops that interconnect perception, cognition, and action in order to generate intelligent behavior, from goal-directed movements to problem-solving to inter-agent communication.

The IK 2007 will aim at bridging between the empirical, theoretical, and simulative sciences involved with exploring body and mind. We will discuss, for example, how humanoid robots can be engineered, what role our motor system plays in understanding others, how decision making is based on bodily ground, or how neural signals can be used to drive artefacts like prostheses or machinery.

Official Website: http://www.ik2007.de