The Whitehead Lectures on Cognition, Computation & Creativity
Spring 2008
Wednesday 23 January
Evolutionary Robotics: Philosophy of Mind using a Screwdriver
Inman Harvey
- Senior Lecturer Informatics, University of Sussex, UK.
The design of autonomous robots has an intimate relationship with the
study of autonomous animals and humans -- robots provide a convenient
puppet show for illustrating current myths about cognition. Like it or
not, any approach to the design of autonomous robots is underpinned by
some philosophical position in the designer. Whereas a philosophical
position normally has to survive in debate, in a project of building
situated robots one's philosophical position affects design decisions
and is then tested in the real world -- doing philosophy of mind with
a screwdriver. I shall discuss, with examples, whether and how
Evolutionary Robotics might lead to creating robots that really want
to do things -- as opposed to 'merely' going through the motions; and
lead up to the question(s) of robot consciousness.
Inman Harvey is a founder-member of the EASy (Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems) group at Sussex, which is the largest group of researchers in the world into aspects of Artificial Life. He helped to lay the foundations for the Evolutionary approach to Robotics in the early 1990s. Current interests include Gaia Theory, Autopoiesis, homeostasis, Dynamical Systems approaches to understanding cognition, and active control of (semi-)autonomous gliders and kites for energy extraction.
Wednesday 30 January
Subjective measures of unconscious knowledge
Zoltan Dienes
Reader in Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, UK
will argue, based on higher order thought theory, that subjective
measures are the best way of determining the conscious status of
knowledge. Using the knowledge gained in implicit learning paradigms
as an example, I will show how confidence ratings can be used to
measure the amounts of conscious and unconscious knowledge expressed
in judgments, and how verbal ratings rather than wagering do a better
job in assessing the relevant higher order thoughts. I will show how
subjective measures can be used to assess the conscious status of the
structural knowledge leading to judgments, and how Jacoby's methods
show only the conscious status of judgment knowledge and not
structural knowledge. Finally I will argue that the interesting divide
in nature (in the case of implicit learning) is probably between the
conscious and unconscious status of structural knowledge and not
judgment knowledge.
Zoltan studied natural sciences at Cambridge, experimental psychology
at Macquarie and Oxford Universities, and have been at University of
Sussex since 1990. I have been a Reader since 1997 and my main
research interest is implicit learning. I co-authored (with Dianne
Berry) a book on implicit learning in 1993 and next year have a book
coming out on scientific and statistical inference.
Wednesday 6 February (TBC)
Wednesday 20 February
The relation of neural oscillations to behavioural performance
Joachim Gross
Professor of Psychology, University of Glasgow
Multiple repetitions of the same experimental trial are typically
associated with fluctuations in behavioural performance in the
individual subject. The neural mechanisms underlying this variability
remain largely unknown. A number of recent studies identified links
between neural oscillations (as measured with MEG/EEG) in different
frequency bands and behavioural performance in tasks investigating
conscious perception and speeded reaction. I will present new analysis
techniques for the investigation of neural oscillations and their
interactions in humans and new experimental evidence supporting a
functional role of neural oscillations for behavioural performance.
Joachim Gross obtained his PhD at the Institute of Medicine (IME) at
the research centre Juelich, Germany and the MPI for Cognitive
Neuroscience in Leipzig. His PhD was on linear and nonlinear
transformations of neuroelectromagnetic signals. He was PostDoc and
research group leader in the Department of Neurology, Duesseldorf
before he was appointed Professor of Psychology at Glasgow University
and member of the steering group for establishing the new Centre for
Cognitive Neuroimaging (CCNi).
His main research interest is the non-invasive investigation of neural
oscillations in humans including development of appropriate analysis
methods and experimental paradigms for studying their functional role.
Wednesday 27 February
The neuroscience of 'tricks of the light'
Tom Troscianko
Professor of Psychology, University of Bristol, UK
The big problem for visual systems is to signal the properties of
relevant objects in the field of view, and to “ignore” the variable
nature of the light falling on the objects. There is evidence for the
optimisation of colour vision for achieving these kinds of aims, for
specified important tasks, such as foraging for food. However, it is
an open (and interesting) question whether, and when, aspects of
illumination such as shadows are ignored in human vision. I will
describe a series of experiments and computational studies which
address this issue, and conclude that the issue is much more rich than
was previously assumed.
Tom Troscianko originally studied Physics, and became a research
scientist at Kodak Ltd, studying colour vision and photography. He did
a PhD in the Department of Optometry and Visual Science at The City
University, London after which (in 1978) he came to Bristol University
to work with Richard Gregory. He became interested in the way in which
vision encodes the properties of the world around us, and spent
periods studying this from a clinical perspective (at Tübingen
University Eye Hospital) and in computer science (at the IBM UK
Scientific Centre, Winchester). He moved to the Psychology Department
at Bristol University in 1988, where he carried out a variety of
projects on vision and complex scenes. In 2000 he became Professor of
Psychology at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the
University of Sussex. In 2002 he returned to Bristol University as
Professor of Psychology and founded the Cognition and Information
Technology Research Centre (COGNIT), which promotes interdisciplinary
research spanning the cognitive, computing, and biological sciences.
He currently holds grants from EPSRC, BBSRC, and industry, to
investigate projects as diverse as the ecology of vision, the use of
CCTV cameras in our cities, they safety of railway signals, and the
construction of a self-aware robot. He is Executive Editor of the
journal Perception.
Wednesday 5 March
The Neuropsychology of Semantic memory
Elizabeth Warrington
Professor of Neuropsychology, Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK
The concept of semantic memory can be used to encompass that body of knowledge held in common by members of a cultural or linguistic group. Semantic memory processes, stores and retrieves information about the meaning of words concepts and facts. The impairment of semantic memory can be the first and only sign of cognitive impairment in patients who have progressive degenerative conditions. These semantic memory deficits can, at least in the early stages of illness, be remarkably circumscribed.
Current debate is centred on two main issues: category specificity and modality specificity. Many accounts of category specificity have focused on the double dissociation between knowledge of living things and man made objects. Evidence that category specific phenomenon may be both more fine grain and broader in range will be reviewed. The significance of semantic memory impairments confined to either the verbal or visual domain will be discussed. It will be suggested that we have evolved separable data bases for our visual and verbal knowledge of the world.
I have been associated with the Institute of Neurology and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery since 1954 when I obtained a research assistant position. In 1960 I took over responsibility for the clinical neuropsychological service to the hospital. I was appointed to a personal chair in Clinical Neuropsychology in 1982. When I retired from the Hospital service in 1996, I joined the Dementia Research Centre in an honorary capacity. During the last 50 years I have been fortunate in having excellent opportunities to further my research interests in varied cognitive domains including memory, language and perception.
Wednesday 12 March
Provenance: an Open Approach to support Workflow Inter-Operability
Luc Moreau
Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK
Over the last few years, e-Science and e-Business have emphasized the need to expose existing and new procedures as services, so that they can be composed in sophisticated functionality for end-users. In particular, workflows have emerged as a paradigm for representing and managing complex distributed scientific computations. To some extent, with workflow technology, e-scientists are today provided with the means to express and run their experiments.
However, while workflow technology is a crucial breakthrough, it is only one of the tools required to support the scientific methodology. As important to domain scientists (and very often ignored by computer scientists!) is the ability to describe past experiments, to reproduce and verify them, and to understand differences between executions. The problem is further compounded by the fact that workflow systems will inevitably be heterogeneous, and multiple workflow technologies are bound to co-exist (e.g. Taverna, Triana, Pegasus, Swift, Kepler).
Provenance (also known as lineage, pedigree, audit trail) is crucial to allow scientists to implement their scientific methodology fully in silico. Provenance of a data product is defined as the process that led to that data product. While provenance technology has traditionally been embedded in execution environments (workflows system, operating system, specific application), we have taken a radically different view by seeing a provenance management system as a distinct first-class component of any computational environments where past executions should be inspect-able. Applications of our approach not only include e-science but also business, where past processes have to be audited.
By taking this view, and separating provenance from workflow, we were able to identify the essence of provenance and to propose an architecture for provenance management systems, which allow past processes to be described, even when multiple execution technologies are involved. In this talk, I present the principles of provenance, its architectural design, its implementation, and integration with several workflow technologies. We have successfully deployed the approach in multiple application domains, including astronomy, aerospace engineering, and medicine.
Professor Moreau is Professor of Computer Science, in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group IAM, School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. His research is concerned with large-scale open distributed systems not subject to centralised control; examples of these include the Internet, the World Wide Web, the Grid and pervasive computing environments.
Wednesday 19 March
Robot Ethics: Fantasy or Necessity?
Steve Torrance
Considered as tools, robots don't really raise special ethical issues. But when we consider them as potential persons, we may have to face up to some more radical ways of understanding robot ethics. First, we need to consider our potential responsibilities towards the robots themselves. Second, we need to think about the potential responsibilities of robots towards us (and no doubt towards each other).
Some would say that to talk of robots as moral agents in their own right is to engage in fantasy. On this view non-organic artificial agents will never have the kinds of autonomy or consciousness that would be necessary to qualify them as members of the moral community – either as targets of moral concern from humans, or as responsible moral actors in their own right.
But there is a contrasting view. The likely multiplication of autonomous robots – in industrial production, on battlefields, in public places, in homes, and so on – means that within a short while they may be making decisions and occupying roles which would certainly have deep moral import if humans were taking such decisions and roles. Perhaps, on this view, there is a need to develop, not just external controls on robot actions, but internal moral self-direction in the robots themselves. If this were so, then building ethical responsibility into robots will be not just a desideratum but a necessity. This could require radical rethinking of social relations.
In this talk I'll present the two sides of this picture and try to unravel some of the conceptual complexities in this area.
Steve Torrance is Emeritus Professor in Cognitive Science at Middlesex University, and a visiting Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. He teaches part-time at Sussex and at Goldsmiths. He has interests in computational and enactive approaches to cognitive science and consciousness, and he has a particular interest in the conceptual and ethical foundations of artificial personhood. He has recently edited journal issues on machine consciousness, ethics and artificial agents, and enactive experience.
Wednesday 23 April
Spring Workshop close: Special lecture
Professor Juri Kropotov
Professor
Juri Kropotov (Director of the Neurobiology of Action Programming
Laboratory, Institute of the Human Brain, Russian Academy of Sciences,
and Professor II, Institute of Psychology, Norwegian University for
Science and Technology) will give a special Whitehead lecture and
Spring Workshop to close the 2007/8 Whitehead lecture series.
Professor Kropotov will give two lectures on Wednesday 23 April, one
for a more specialist audience on "ERPs and their independent
components" at 2 pm, and a second for a cross-disciplinary audience on
"Normative EEG databases and the assessment and rehabilitation of brain
dysfunction" at the usual time of 4 pm. Both lectures will take place
in the Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths.
Everyone is very welcome to attend the lectures and a drinks reception afterwards.
The lectures are a taster of some of the highlights of Professor Kropotov's Workshop on qEEG and Neurotherapy
[pdf]. If you are interested in attending the workshop, there are still
a few places available, and you should contact Tony Steffert (t.steffert)
to arrange registration as soon as possible (there is a special rate
for Goldsmiths' staff, and an even more favourable rate for Goldsmiths'
PhD students who can make a case that the workshop is relevant to
their studies).