Call For Participants -- NIPS*98 Workshop

DEVELOPMENT AND MATURATION IN NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL STRUCTURES

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Workshop Motivation:
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We believe that an ongoing collaboration between computational work
and developmental work could help unravel some of the most difficult
issues in each domain.  Computational work can address dynamic,
hierarchical developmental processes that have been relatively
intractable to traditional developmental analysis, and developmental
principles and theory can generate insight into the process of
building and modeling complex and adaptive computational structures.

In hopes of bringing developmental processes and analysis into the
neural modeling mainstream, this session will focus developmental
modelers and theorists on the task of constructing a set of working
questions, issues and approaches.  The session will hopefully include
researchers studying developmental phenomena across all levels of
scale and analysis, with the aim of highlighting both system-specific
and general features of development.

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Workshop Format:
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The workshop will be 2 3-hour sessions.  Each session will be a panel
discussion, with 3-5 short presentations (20-30 minutes in length).
If you wish to give a short presentation at the workshop, please
e-mail a 1-2 paragraph proposal to Gary Haith
(haith@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov) before 9/14/98.

Please let us know if you would like to give a longer or shorter
presentation and we will try to accomodate your request.

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Organizers/Advisory Committee:
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Contact:
Gary Haith, Computational Sciences, NASA Ames Research Center
phone #: (650) 604-3049
FAX #:   (650) 604-3594
E-mail:  haith@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
Mail:    NASA Ames Research Center
         Mail Stop 269-3
         Mountain View, CA 94035-1000

Jeff Elman, Cognitive Science, UCSD
Silvano Colombano, Computational Sciences, NASA Ames Research Center
Marshall Haith, Developmental Psychology, University of Denver

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Suggested Presentation/Discussion Topics:
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Some of the issues that this session could address (specific issues
will depend on the participants):
-- the role and function of intrinsic factors in development
	-- canalization/robustness vs. flexibility/adaptation
-- the evolution of development
	-- genetic encoding schemes, life histories, evolutionary
	pressures
-- the interaction between development and learning (adaptation)
-- specific principles and examples from biology and modeling
   -- neural systems (e.g. visual circuits)
   -- motor systems (e.g. learning to walk)
   -- cognitive systems (e.g. language and conceptual systems)
-- general principles of development that are relatively unaddressed
   in past modeling work
	-- economic, flexible and robust structural encoding/rules
	for growth
	-- environment of infancy, parental investment
	-- spontaneous neural activity, play
	-- "Starting Small"/"Less is More"
	-- "experience-expectant" structure