CAMPUS THEORY SEMINAR
          Part of the SCIENCE AT THE EDGE Seminar Series

                    Friday, September 7, 2001
                      11:30am, Room 224 PA

                    Refreshments at 11:15am


        Autonomous Mental Development by Robots and Animals 

                          Juyang Weng
          Department of Computer Science and Engineering
         Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824
                       weng@cse.msu.edu 
                 http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/

A new synthesis of the neural, cognitive, behavioral, artificial 
intelligence and robotics is on the horizon. The topic which has a 
potential to unite these disparate fields is computational autonomous 
mental development.  The term "mental" refers to cognitive, behavioral 
and other mental skills that are exhibited by humans, higher animals and 
artificial systems.  Computational autonomous mental development refers 
to the computational process by which a brain-like machine, natural or 
artificial, develops mental skills under the guidance of an intrinsic 
developmental program and through its own autonomous activities using 
its sensors and effectors to interact with its environment.  The 
developmental program for an animal resides in the genes as a result of 
many generations of evolution; while that for a machine is initially 
programmed into the machine by humans but the environment changes the 
ways that the developmental program operates. Potentially, there are 
enormous benefits as a result of this synthesis:  For behavioral and 
neural scientists, it promises a deeper, more precise and more systematic 
understanding about the ways our brain works through the computational 
study of its developmental processes.  For the engineering and computer 
sciences, there is the vision of greatly enhanced capability for machines 
to interact with humans and to process information to a degree that 
requires kinds of machine intelligence other than those possible before.  

This talk will discuss some new discoveries in neuroscience that highlight 
the exquisite plasticity of the brain with experience through infancy and 
adulthood.  We will also describe SAIL robot, an early prototype of a new 
kind of robots: developmental robots that are capable of autonomous mental 
development.  Some experiments will be presented through a video presenta-
tion.  Some background information of this new subject is discussed in an 
article in Science available at "http://www.cse.msu.edu/dl/SciencePaper.pdf".