[Amdnl] Devrob Workshop -- summary

[Matthew Schlesinger]

Apologies for duplicate copies!  In case anyone is curious, I wanted to
provide a brief summary of the developmental robotics workshop that took
place last week:

In the interests of outreach and improving collaboration between
computational and behavioral researchers, Jochen Triesch and I organized a
half-day workshop (http://icdl-epirob.org/icisdevrob2012.html) a day before
the *International Conference on Infant Studies *in Minneapolis.  The
invited speakers were Minoru Asada (Osaka University), Chen Yu (Indiana
University), Giorgio Metta (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia), Tony Morse
(University of Plymouth), Javier Movellan (UC San Diego), Katharina
Rohlfing (University of Bielefeld), and Brian Scassellati (Yale
University).

The presentations were superb, and very well-pitched to a broad,
interdisciplinary audience.  There were also lots of great examples that
illustrated different robot platforms, as well as ways to model
developmental change in artificial systems.  Given my experiences in
psychology, I thought each speaker did an outstanding job of making their
work accessible and relevant to developmental researchers.  Despite a
packed schedule, and competition with other parallel workshops, we
maintained a steady audience of 40-50 guests (including a mixture of both
computational/robotics and psychology people).  There was also a good level
of discussion and engagement from the audience throughout the workshop.

Given the success of our first attempt,  we are now thinking about
following up with a similar event at next year's *Society for Research in
Child Development *meeting in Seattle (April 18-20).  It's difficult to
imagine, but since the SRCD meeting is less than a year away, we should
starting planning very soon if indeed we want to host a workshop.  If so,
we should also think about ways to improve on what we accomplished this
year, in particular, moving the process from interaction and dialog to
collaboration and long-term interaction!

Don't hesitate to email me or Jochen (triesch at fias.uni-frankfurt.de) if you
have any questions.  Cheers,

Matt
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