Program for the
AISB Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts *
Edinburgh, Scotland

Symposium Chairs:
Kerstin Dautenhahn (Univ. Reading) and Chrystopher Nehaniv (Univ. Hertfordshire)

* Supported by a grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

Wednesday, 7th April 1999

09:00-10:00

Keynote Talk:
Josep Call (University of Liverpool, UK)
Emulation in Relation to Other Forms of Social Learning

10:00-10:30 Paper Presentation:

Mark Gardner (Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, UK)
Do Animals Learn to Imitate as well as Learning by Imitation?

10:30-11:00 Coffee/Tea Break

11:00-12:00

Keynote Talk:
Andrew Whiten (University of St. Andrews, Scotland)
Cognitive Issues in Imitation: Studies with Child and Chimpanzee

12:00-12:30 : Paper Presentation:

Jason Noble and Peter M. Todd (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany) :
Is It Really Imitation? A Review of Simple Mechanisms in Social Information Gathering

12:30 Lunch

14:00-14:50 Paper Session : Human Imitation

Tony Charman & Chi-Tai Huang (UCL, UK)
Pre-schoolers Imitating Failed Attempts: Reading Intentions vs. Object Affordances

Stefan Vogt (Lancaster University, UK)
Constraints in Human Imitative Behaviour

14:50-15:00 : Poster Introductions

Christine Caldwell (University of St. Andrews, Scotland)
Observational Learning in the Marmoset Monkey (Callithrix jacchus)

Gianluca Baldassarre (University of Essex, UK)
Trial-and-Error Learning, Noise and Selection in Cultural Evolution: A Study Through Artificial Life Simulations

Yuval Marom and Gillian Hayes (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Attentional Mechanisms for Imitational Learning

and others

15:00-15:30

Chrystopher Nehaniv (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Reading, UK)
Imitation in Animals and Artifacts

15:30 Coffee/Tea Break

16:00-17:15 Paper Session : Language and Culture

Oliver Goodenough (Vermont Law School, USA)
Information Replication in Culture: Three Modalities for the Transmission of Culture Elements

Mike Oliphant (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Cultural Transmission of Communication Systems

Simon Kirby (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Learning, Bottlenecks and Infinity: A Working Model of the Evolution of Syntactic Communication

17:15 End of Day

Evening - Harold Cohen: AI and Visual Creativity

Thursday, 8th April 1999

09:00-10:00


Keynote Talk:
Cecilia Heyes (UCL, UK)
Transformation and Associative Theories of Imitation

10:00-10:30 Paper Presentation:

J. Fritz & K. Kotrschal (Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle, Austria)
Social Constraints and Profitability of Social Learning

10:30-11:00 Coffee/Tea Break

11:00-12:00:

Keynote Talk:
Elisabetta Visalberghi (Istituto di Psicologia, CNR, Rome, Italy)
"Do Monkeys Ape?"   Ten Years After

12:00-12:30: Paper Presentation:

John Demiris and Gillian Hayes (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Active Imitation

12:30 Lunch

14:00 AISB Convention Plenary Talk:

Margaret Boden: Creativity and Evaluation

15:30-16:00 Coffee/Tea Break

16:00-17:15 Paper Session: Robotic Imitation

Aude Billard (Edinburgh, Scotland and LAMI-EPFL, Switzerland)
Imitation Skills as a Means to Enhance Learning of a Synthetic Proto-Language in an Autonomous Robot

Cynthia Breazeal (MIT AI Lab, USA)
Imitation as Social Exchange between Humans and Robots

Brian Scassellati (MIT AI Lab, USA)
Knowing What to Imitate and Knowing When You Succeed

17:15 End of Day

Evening - Mark Turner: The Literary Mind


Friday, 9th April 1999

09:00-10:00

Keynote Talk:
Henry Lieberman (MIT Media Lab, USA)
Art Imitates Life: Programming by Example as an Imitation Game

10:00-10:25 Paper Presentation:

Dolores Cañamero, Josep Lluis Arcos, and Ramon Lopez de Mantaras (Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), Spain)
Imitating Human Performances to Automatically Generate Expressive Jazz Ballads

10:25-10:45 Coffee/Tea Break

10:45-11:10 Paper Presentation:

Edmund Furse (University of Glamorgan, UK)
A Model of Imitation Learning of Algorithms from Worked Examples

11:10-11:30 Invited Presentation:

Martin Loomes (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
Behaviour Cloning: A Technique for Requirements Engineering


11:30-12:30

Keynote Talk:
Louis M. Herman (University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA)
Imitation of Self and Others by Dolphins
12:30 Lunch

14:00-14:55 Paper Session : Language and Information

John R. Skoyles (London, UK)
Language and Imitation: Informational Processing and the Elementary Units of Speech

Daniel Livingstone & Colin Fyfe (University of Paisley, UK)
Diversity in Learned Communication

14:55-15:40 Paper Session: Simulation

Elio Tuci, Jason Noble and Peter M. Todd (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany)
"I'll Have What She's Having": A Simulation Analysis of the Copying of Food Preferences in Norway Rats

Yuzuru Sato & Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Undecidability of the Imitation Game

15:40-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-16:30 Paper Presentation:

James R. Hurford (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Overcoming the Learning Paradox: Redundant Messages and Noisy Signals

16:30-17:15 Panel Discussion

17:15 End of Symposium


Symposium Homepage: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/aisb.html

Registration Information
is at http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/daidb/people/homes/geraint/aisb99/registration. html

For Accomodation Booking see
http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/daidb/people/homes/geraint/aisb99/#accom