Aim and Scope
The objective of this task force is to strengthen the links between evolutionary approaches to artificial intelligence and the developmental and cognitive systems community. There are many potential convergences and common discussion topics, including, but not limited to:
- A large part of the evolutionary intelligence community work on “Generative and Developmental Encoding” to evolve large, life-like neural networks (“artificial brains”); as the name suggest it, these encoding exploit developmental rules to make large neural networks that exhibit some features of biological nervous systems like modularity, hierarchy, repetition, symmetry, etc.
- A new trend in evolutionary intelligence is to study alternative selective pressures and, in particular, selective pressures that encourage exploration (novelty search, behavioral diversity, etc.); these techniques share many objectives and ideas with the exploration algorithms studied in the developmental robotics community (e.g. babbling).
- Evolution can be an effective metaphore to explain and therefore imitate the plasticity of the brain (see neural darwinism and neural replicators).
- Evolution and life-time learning are two complementary processes that interact at different scales and a key research avenue is to understand what should be designed by evolution and what should be left for life-time learning.
TF Chair
Jean-Baptiste Mouret
Inria Nancy - Grand Est
http://pages.isir.upmc.fr/~mouret/website/
jean-baptiste.mouret@inria.fr
TF Vice-Chair:
Jeff Clune (University of Wyoming / USA)
jeffclune@uwyo.edu
http://jeffclune.com
Stéphane Doncieux (UPMC/FR)
doncieux@isir.upmc.fr
http://www.isir.upmc.fr/?op=view_profil&id=2&lang=en
TF Members
Richard Duro (Universidade da Coruna / Spain)
richard.duro@udc.es
http://www.gii.udc.es/presentacion/persona/32
Andrea Soltoggio (Loughborough University / UK)
a.soltoggio@lboro.ac.uk
http://andrea.soltoggio.net
Sebastian Risi IT University of Copenhagen / Denmark)
sebastian.risi@gmail.com
Recent Activities
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Stéphane Doncieux initiated a dialogue on “Representational redescription in humans and machines”, in the IEEE CIS Newsletter on CDS, 12(1).
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JB Mouret, J Clune, A. Cully and D. Tarapore published a milestone article in Nature: Cully, A., Clune, J., Tarapore, D., & Mouret, J. B. (2015). Robots that can adapt like animals. Nature, 521 (7553), 503-507.
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July 2015: Sebastian Risi and Jean-Baptiste Mouret are co-chairing the “Generative and Developmental Systems” track a GECCO’2015 (Madrid)
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April 2015: Sebastian Risi was local chair or Evostar 2015 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Jean-Baptiste Mouret and Stéphane Doncieux presented a 3-hour tutorial about Evolutionary Robotics at GECCO 2015 (Madrid, Spain) and ECAL 2015 (York, UK)
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Sebastian Risi will do a lecture about “Bio-inspired, Automated Design of Machine Bodies and Artificial Brains” at for the Czech European Robotics Week (Prague, November 2015).