11 June 2007
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
EXPERIMENTS ON LANGUAGE EVOLUTION From models to empirical observation Nijmegen (The Netherlands), 11 June 2007 Luc Steels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Sony Computer Science Laboratory Parijs. Monday the 11th of June, the NVP presents a masterclass of interest to PhD students in a broad range of fields. Motivated master students are also welcome. Recently, the subject of language evolution has received more and more interest in almost all fields related to language: from anthropology and cognitive psychology to linguistics and neurobiology. A very original approach to the subject is through experimentation with robots. Considering the present state of research on Artificial Intelligence it is possible, in principle, to program autonomous (even humanoid) robots in such a way that they independently create a communication system grounded in their perceptual experience of the world. Luc Steels, director of the Artifcial Intelligence Lab of the VU Brussels and Sony CSL Lab, will give a masterclass on how to link experiments on the origins of language with such robots to experiments with people. There will be opportunity to present your ideas on how to perform experiments on language evolution and to get individual feedback from Luc Steels. Also, there will be opportunity for discussion, both at the masterclass and during drinks afterwards. See http://www.psychonomie.nl/nvpmasterclass for more information about the subject, opportunity to present your ideas, the program and registration.