[Amdnl] GECCO Workshop on Evo - Devo - Robotics

[Stéphane Doncieux]

		  Second call for contributions

		WORKSHOP ON Evo - Devo - Robotics
		      July 8, 8:30AM-12:30AM

		 to be held as part of the

   2012 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2012)
                  July 7-11, Philadelphia, PA, USA

                   Organized by ACM SIGEVO
		http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2012

  Submission Deadline for this workshop: March 28th, 2012


=== News ===

Giogio Metta, the father of the iCub robot (http://www.icub.org/),
will give an invited talk in addition to other distinguished
researchers, see below for the list of speakers.


=== Topic ===

Developmental robotics (also known as epigenetic robotics) is mainly
concerned with modelling the postnatal development of cognitive
behaviours in living systems, such as language, emotion, curiosity,
anticipation, and social skills.  While current work in this field has
shown significant successes, several aspects can be added to go even
further. First, ontogenetically, mental development is based on and
closely coupled with physical development of an organism, including
development of both the body plan and the nervous systems. Autonomous
mental development in living system was gradually shaped by a
brain-body co-evolution embedded in a changing environment. The
introduction of morphogenetic robotics addresses this first challenge
in developmental robotics to a certain extent by integrating mental
and physical development. Second, biological evidence suggests that
autonomous mental development is driven by intrinsic motivational
systems among others. Current robotic systems have a predefined
intrinsic motivation system. However, the evolutionary origin that
accounts for both physical and mental development is still missing.
Evolutionary robotics applies evolutionary algorithms to the automatic
design of neural controllers for autonomous robots without considering
the role of development. Thus, integrating research on developmental
(including epigenetic and morphogenetic) robotics and evolutionary
robotics is the natural next step. Developmental plasticity can not
only bias evolution, but also enhance evolvability by maintaining
genetic diversity in changing environments and resolving
robustness-variability trade-off. Therefore, we believe that it is
high time to bring together evolutionary robotics and developmental
robotics to form a new discipline evolutionary developmental robotics
(evo-devo-robo).

=== Intended audience ===

The workshop intends to discuss recent developments in evolutionary
robotics and epigenetics robotics to highlight common problematics and
the complementarity of these approaches. It is aimed at facilitating
the exchanges between the two communities.

=== Invited speakers ===

*  Dr. Joshua C. Bongard, University of Vermont, USA
*  Dr. Nicolas Bredeche, University Paris-Sud, France
*  Dr. René Doursat, Res. Group in Biomimetics, Universidad de Malaga, Spain
*  Prof. Dr. Fumiya Iida, Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems ETH
Zurich,Switzerland
*  Dr. Manuel Lopes, INRIA Bordeaux, France Switzerland
*  Dr. Girgio Metta, LIRA-Lab, university of Genova, Italia
*  Dr. Kenneth Stanley, University of Central Florida, USA

=== Organizers ===

* Dr. Stéphane Doncieux, University Pierre and Marie Curie, France
* Dr. Yaochu Jin, University of Surrey, UK
* Dr. Jean-Baptiste Mouret, University Pierre and Marie Curie, France

=== Submissions and deadlines ===

Submission: extended abstracts (2-4 pages) following ACM template should
be sent in electronic form (pdf) to evodevorobo_at_isir.upmc.fr
March 28th, 2012: Workshop Papers Submission Deadline
April 9th, 2012: Notification of Acceptance
April 16th, 2012: Camera-Ready Paper Submission
July 8th, 2012: Workshop

Submitted abstracts will be presented as posters during the workshop.
Each author will have the opportunity to introduce his work during a
1-5min talk. Original works, position papers as well as overviews of 
author's recent work are all welcome. All abstracts will be included 
in the GECCO workshop proceedings.


GECCO is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special
Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO). SIG Services: 2 Penn
Plaza, Suite 701,
New York, NY, 10121, USA, 1-800-342-6626 (USA and Canada) or
+212-626-0500 (Global).

Stéphane Doncieux, Yaochu Jin and Jean-Baptiste Mouret