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Alife Digest Number 111
Alife Digest, Number 111
Monday, September 20th 1993
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Today's Topics:
Calendar of alife related events
PerAc94 call for papers
Book recommendation
Cognitive Science Conference Announcement
ISIKNH'94
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Date: Mon, 20 Sep 93 12:55:01 -0700
From: alife@COGNET.UCLA.EDU
Subject: calendar of alife related events
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Molecular Nanotechnology Oct 14-16, 199 v109
Neural Networks and Telecommunications, Princeton, NJ Oct 18-20,1993 v100
Fluctuations and Order, Los Alamos, NM Sept 9-12, 1993 v102
Robot Games, Glasgow Scotland Sept 23-25, 1993 v109
Neural Information Processing Systems, Denver, CO Nov 29-Dec 2, 1993 v98
Vancouver Cognitive Science Conference, BC, Canada Feb 11-12, 1994 v111
Third Conf on Evolutionary Programming, San Diego, CA Feb 24-25, 1994 v103
AAAI Symposium, Stanford CA Mar 21-23, 14 v110
Cybernetics and Systems Research, Vienna April 5-8, 1994 v101,103
Integrating Knowledge and Neural Heuristics May 9-10, 1994 v111
Intnl Conf Knowledge Rep and Reasoning, Bonn, Germany May 24-27, 1994 v101
IEEE Computational Intelligence, Lake Buena Vista FL Jun 26-Jul 2, 1994 v106
Alife IV, Cambridge MA July 6-8, 1994 v108
Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Brighton, UK Aug 8-12, 1994 v101
(Send announcements of other activities to alife@cognet.ucla.edu)
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Date: Fri, 20 Aug 93 17:16:39 +0200
From: nicoud@di.epfl.ch (Jean-Daniel Nicoud)
Subject: PerAc94 call for papers
A state of the art conference on perceptive processing, artificial
life and autonomous agents.
Lausanne, Switzerland, 7-9 september 1994
Deadline for the call for abstract of papers: February 1, 1994
Deadline for the call for posters, demos and videos: June 1, 1994
Information: Prof J.D.Nicoud, LAMI-EPFL, 1015 Lausanne.
Fax +41 21 693-5263
e-mail nicoud@di.epfl.ch
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Date: Wed, 15 Sep 93 08:00:13 PDT
From: abbott@aero.org
Subject: Book recommendation
I just finished reading a beautiful, little book. Karl Sigmund's "Games
of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior" (Oxford
University Press, 1993) is a layman's level presentation of mathematical
models of evolution. The heart of the book consists of chapters 3
through 8: Population ecology and chaos; Random drift and chain
reactions; Population genetics; Evolution and sex; Evolutionary game
theory; and Reciprocity and the evolution of cooperation. (The last is
a lovely description of the various Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments and
their implications.) Sigmund describes, from a mathematician's
perspective, population growth and decline and the various mechanisms
behind them. But his descriptions are presented in words rather than
equations.
Sigmund is with the Institute of Mathematics, University of Vienna, and
his civilized, witty style struck me as very European. (I suppose that
comment might strike him as very American.) Writing, for example, about
the evolution of sex, he says,
"Male guppies display an ardour which is truly stunning. They spend
almost all their time courting. On average, they try once or twice *a
minute* to copulate. Females, predictably, are less enthusiastic."
(It took me barely a minute of thumbing through the book to come upon
this passage as the kind of example of Sigmund's writing that I wanted
to quote.) He goes on, of course, to explain the evolutionary
significance of such a relationship.
While finishing the book it struck me that perhaps one reason that I as
a computer scientist (and not a mathematician) am drawn to evolution,
genetics, artificial life, etc. is that both computer systems and
ecologies are open ended, dynamic, and often understandable as discrete,
iterated processes. In both classes of systems one has simple rules
that, when iterated indefinitely, yield complex results. Of course it
is not an original observation that this occurs. (In fact, chapter 2 of
the book, about cellular automata struck me as somewhat old-hat.
Perhaps that is because its focus is on Game-of-Life automata as
universal. That never struck me as anything other than an interesting
puzzle.) But it never occurred to me before that the fields of
computation and population dynamics were quite so closely related and
why I feel drawn to both of them.
To return to sex, Sigmund summarizes one of his sections as follows.
"Females are more valuable [than males]. This makes them a bottleneck
for population growth. Most males are superfluous. There are many
species (for instance, human) where the sperm of a single male would
suffice for inseminating all eggs of all females. Why, then, are there
so many males around?"
He goes on to explain that genes delivered from parent to grandchild
through male children are just as effectively propagated as those
delivered through female children. Hence from a parent's perspective
one should "pick" the sex that is most in demand.
Elsewhere he makes the point that to a great extent progress depends on
the play that comes with the elimination of constraints. With relish
(but without mustard), he notes the ambiguity of the word "play" in this
context.
"When our ancestors adopted an upright posture, several millions of
years ago, they thereby freed their arms. As soon as hands were no
longer used for support (in the *knuckle walk* of primates), they could
be used to much better effect, for carrying things and using tools.
*Homo* became first upright, then tool-handling, then clever: it all
started with the loss of a constraint."
Surprisingly, he does not go on to speculate that superfluity provided
us males (and now with sexual equality, females too) the freedom to play
games, and hence to invent things like mathematical models of population
growth.
I strongly recommend this insightful and playful book. It is available
in paperback. Judging from the handwritten note on the copy on my desk
(which my library bought for me), it costs only $15.00.
-- Russ Abbott
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Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1993 15:12:27 -0700
From: Fred Popowich <popowich@cs.sfu.ca>
Subject: Cognitive Science Conference Announcement
ANNOUNCEMENT
7th Annual Vancouver Cognitive Science Conference
February 11-12 (Fri-Sat) 1994
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
MODELING RATIONAL AND MORAL AGENTS
PARTICIPANTS AND PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME
Evolution and Rationality
The Evolution of Cooperation
B. A. Huberman (Xerox PARC) "Social Dilemmas"
Robert Frank (Cornell) "The Evolution of One-Shot Cooperation"
Evolutionary Models
Peter Danielson (UBC) "Artificial Morality and Genetic Programming"
Evolution and Rationality
Elliott Sober (Wisconsin) "The Adaptive Advantage of Learning
and A Priori Prejudice"
Brian Skyrms (UC Irvine) "Charles Darwin meets The Logic of Decision."
Rationality and Morality
Rationality & Morality
David Schmidtz (Yale) "Rational Choice and Moral Constraint"
Edward McClennen (Bowling Green) "The Rationality of Commitment?"
Duncan MacIntosh (Dalhousie) "Rational Preferences
and the Structure of Morality"
Models of Constrained Maximization
William Talbott (U. Washington) "Moral Equilibrium Theory"
Leslie Burkholder (Carnegie Mellon) "Artificial Dispositions"
Modeling Rationality
Ronald deSousa (Toronto) "Modeling Rationality: A Normative or
Descriptive Task?"
HISTORY
In February 1988, Simon Fraser University inaugurated its Cognitive Science
Programme by hosting the first annual interdisciplinary conference in
cognitive science. The topics and speakers for the annual conference are
drawn from philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology.
The topics of previous conferences are summarized below.
1988 Information, Language and Cognition
1989 Formal Grammar
1990 Connectionism
1991 Logic and Cognition
1992 Perception
1993 Biological Basis of Language
The proceedings of these conferences are published by Oxford University
Press in the Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science Series.
CONFERENCE INFORMATION
The conference will take place at the Harbour Centre, the downtown Vancouver
extension of Simon Fraser University at 515 West Hastings Street. There will
be a banquet the evening of Saturday February 12th. For further information
about the conference please send electronic mail to Fred Popowich at
popowich@cs.sfu.ca
CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
Conference Chair:
Steven Davis, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University
Program Chair:
Peter Danielson, Department of Philosophy/Centre for Applied Ethics
University of British Columbia
Local Arrangements:
Kathleen Akins, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University
Nancy Hedberg, Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University
Fred Popowich, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University
Richard Wright, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University
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Date: Thu, 16 Sep 93 14:41:23 -0400
From: "Li-Min Fu" <fu@whale.cis.ufl.edu>
Subject: ISIKNH'94
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Symposium on Integrating Knowledge and Neural Heuristics
(ISIKNH'94)
Sponsored by University of Florida, and AAAI,
in cooperation with IEEE Neural Network Council, INNS-SIG, and FLAIRS.
Time: May 9-10 1994; Place: Pensacola Beach, Florida, USA.
A large amount of research has been directed toward integrating neural
and symbolic methods in recent years. Especially, the integration of
knowledge-based principles and neural heuristics holds great promise in
solving complicated real-world problems. This symposium will provide a
forum for discussions and exchanges of ideas in this area. The objective
of this symposium is to bring together researchers from a variety of
fields who are interested in applying neural network techniques to
augmenting existing knowledge or proceeding the other way around, and
especially, who have demonstrated that this combined approach
outperforms either approach alone. We welcome views of this problem
from areas such as constraint-(knowledge-) based learning and reasoning,
connectionist symbol processing, hybrid intelligent systems, fuzzy
neural networks, multi-strategic learning, and cognitive science.
Examples of specific research include but are not limited to:
1. How do we build a neural network based on {\em a priori}
knowledge (i.e., a knowledge-based neural network)?
2. How do neural heuristics improve the current model
for a particular problem (e.g., classification, planning,
signal processing, and control)?
3. How does knowledge in conjunction with neural heuristics
contribute to machine learning?
4. What is the emergent behavior of a hybrid system?
5. What are the fundamental issues behind the combined approach?
Program activities include keynote speeches, paper presentation,
panel discussions, and tutorials.
*****
Scholarships are offered to assist students in attending the
symposium. Students who wish to apply for a scholarship should send
their resumes and a statement of how their researches are related
to the symposium.
*****
Symposium Chairs:
LiMin Fu, University of Florida, USA.
Chris Lacher, Florida State University, USA.
Program Committee:
Jim Anderson, Brown University, USA
Michael Arbib, University of Southern California, USA
Fevzi Belli, The University of Paderborn, Germany
Jim Bezdek, University of West Florida, USA
Bir Bhanu, University of California, USA
Su-Shing Chen, National Science Foundation, USA
Tharam Dillon, La Trobe University, Australia
Douglas Fisher, Vanderbilt University, USA
Paul Fishwick, University of Florida, USA
Stephen Gallant, HNC Inc., USA
Yoichi Hayashi, Ibaraki University, Japan
Susan I. Hruska, Florida State University, USA
Michel Klefstad-Sillonville CCETT, France
David C. Kuncicky, Florida State University, USA
Joseph Principe, University of Florida, USA
Sylvian Ray, University of Illinois, USA
Armando F. Rocha, University of Estadual, Brasil
Ron Sun, University of Alabama, USA
Keynote Speaker: Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Ohio-State University
Schedule for Contributed Papers
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Paper Summaries Due: December 15, 1993
Notice of Acceptance Due: February 1, 1994
Camera Ready Papers Due: March 1, 1994
Extended paper summaries should be
limited to four pages (single or double-spaced)
and should include the title, names of the authors, the
network and mailing addresses and telephone number of the corresponding
author. Important research results should be attached.
Send four copies of extended paper summaries to
LiMin Fu
Dept. of CIS, 301 CSE
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
USA
(e-mail: fu@cis.ufl.edu; phone: 904-392-1485).
Students' applications for a scholarship should also be sent
to the above address.
General information and registration materials can be obtained by
writing to
Rob Francis
ISIKNH'94
DOCE/Conferences
2209 NW 13th Street, STE E
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32609-3476
USA
(Phone: 904-392-1701; fax: 904-392-6950)
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If you intend to attend the symposium, you may submit the following
information by returning this message:
NAME: _______________________________________
ADDRESS: ____________________________________
_____________________________________________
PHONE: ______________________________________
FAX: ________________________________________
E-MAIL: _____________________________________
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End of ALife Digest
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