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Information processing systems (IPSs) that behave in the real-world are constantly bombarded with noise from the environment. Although the real-world offers noise for free, this extrinsic noise source has a cost associated to it. The problem is related to the fact that the environmental intricacies (i.e. noisy distribution) in which the IPS samples from is everchanging. Consequently, the IPS is faced with the conundrum of maintaining stability in a dynamic environment, while at the same time, remaining flexible so as to match its intrinsic timescales with the timescales of the environment. Here, we propose conjoining three ingredients for solving the timescale incompatibility issue between IPSs and the environment. First, we propose evolving IPSs in an online fashion such that the system operates on-thefly. Second, we propose the implementation of online operations in robotic hardware - a methodological tool for allowing the IPS to provide feedback during its interaction with the environment. Finally, we propose learning from brain mechanisms as a source of inspiration for building more flexible and adaptive IPSs. In chapter one, we initiate our first attempt towards achieving flexibility in these systems. To this end, we study the interaction between short-term plasticity (STP) and spike-timingdependent plasticity (STDP), two important plasticity rules we've learned from the brain. As such, we construct a microcircuit motif of two units, and show in simulation, how each unit can discriminate the position of a moving stimulus. In chapter two, we study synaptic plasticity in the context of an online robotic domain. To do so, we increase network size to six units, and endow the circuit with STP as a candidate mechanism for microcircuit sensitivity to inputs. Here, we study motion discrimination using a Raspberry Pi microcontroller as the information processing unit. We also use a stationary camera to process images from the real-world. Finally, we attach two LED light sensors for providing feedback of how the system is behaving. Results show that the agent is capable of discriminating the direction of a moving stimulus. In the final chapter of the thesis, we move away from the static online robotic implementation, towards a more dynamic setting. In doing so, we develop a keyboard listener for online mobile robot control. Here, the motor trajectory of the robot is directly linked to network activity of 500 units. Furthermore, the agent is placed in an ecological context where it interacts with a human subject. During human-robot interaction, the motor trajectory of the robot is studied, enabling the human to make inferences about how neural computation is unfolding on-the-fly. The robot illustrates useful properties, one of which is high degree of flexibility and adaptation to ongoing input streams. Overall, we conjoin the three ingredients mentioned above as a framework for solving the timescale incompatibility issue between IPSs and the environment.
How can neural and morphological computations be effectively combined and realized in embodied closed-loop systems (e.g., robots) such that they can become more like living creatures in their level of performance? Understanding this will lead to new technologies and a variety of applications. To tackle this research question, here, we bring together experts from different fields (including Biology, Computational Neuroscience, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence) to share their recent findings and ideas and to update our research community. This eBook collects 17 cutting edge research articles, covering neural and morphological computations as well as the transfer of results to real world applications, like prosthesis and orthosis control and neuromorphic hardware implementation.
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"This book describes a new theoretical approach--Dynamic Field Theory (DFT)--that explains how people think and act"--
How can neural and morphological computations be effectively combined and realized in embodied closed-loop systems (e.g., robots) such that they can become more like living creatures in their level of performance? Understanding this will lead to new technologies and a variety of applications. To tackle this research question, here, we bring together experts from different fields (including Biology, Computational Neuroscience, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence) to share their recent findings and ideas and to update our research community. This eBook collects 17 cutting edge research articles, covering neural and morphological computations as well as the transfer of results to real world applications, like prosthesis and orthosis control and neuromorphic hardware implementation.
Practitioners and scholars explore ethical, social, and conceptual issues arising in relation to such devices as fitness monitors, neural implants, and a toe-controlled computer mouse. Body-centered computing now goes beyond the “wearable” to encompass implants, bionic technology, and ingestible sensors—technologies that point to hybrid bodies and blurred boundaries between human, computer, and artificial intelligence platforms. Such technologies promise to reconfigure the relationship between bodies and their environment, enabling new kinds of physiological interfacing, embodiment, and productivity. Using the term embodied computing to describe these devices, this book offers essays by practitioners and scholars from a variety of disciplines that explore the accompanying ethical, social, and conceptual issues. The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashiontech, which offers users an aura of “cool” in exchange for their data; and the “final frontier” of technosupremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds. Taken together, the essays show the importance of considering embodied technologies in their social and political contexts rather than in isolated subjectivity or in purely quantitative terms. Contributors Roba Abbas, Andrew Iliadis, Gary Genosko, Suneel Jethani, Deborah Lupton, Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, Marcel O'Gorman, Maggie Orth, Isabel Pedersen, Christine Perakslis, Kevin Warwick, Elizabeth Wissinger
The Handbook of Cognitive Science provides an overview of recent developments in cognition research, relying upon non-classical approaches. Cognition is explained as the continuous interplay between brain, body, and environment, without relying on classical notions of computations and representation to explain cognition. The handbook serves as a valuable companion for readers interested in foundational aspects of cognitive science, and neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. The handbook begins with an introduction to embodied cognitive science, and then breaks up the chapters into separate sections on conceptual issues, formal approaches, embodiment in perception and action, embodiment from an artificial perspective, embodied meaning, and emotion and consciousness. Contributors to the book represent research overviews from around the globe including the US, UK, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
The Handbook of Cognitive Science provides an overview of recent developments in cognition research, relying upon non-classical approaches. Cognition is explained as the continuous interplay between brain, body, and environment, without relying on classical notions of computations and representation to explain cognition. The handbook serves as a valuable companion for readers interested in foundational aspects of cognitive science, and neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. The handbook begins with an introduction to embodied cognitive science, and then breaks up the chapters into separate sections on conceptual issues, formal approaches, embodiment in perception and action, embodiment from an artificial perspective, embodied meaning, and emotion and consciousness. Contributors to the book represent research overviews from around the globe including the US, UK, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
This text, based on a course taught by Randall O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata over the past several years, provides an in-depth introduction to the main ideas in the computational cognitive neuroscience. The goal of computational cognitive neuroscience is to understand how the brain embodies the mind by using biologically based computational models comprising networks of neuronlike units. This text, based on a course taught by Randall O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata over the past several years, provides an in-depth introduction to the main ideas in the field. The neural units in the simulations use equations based directly on the ion channels that govern the behavior of real neurons, and the neural networks incorporate anatomical and physiological properties of the neocortex. Thus the text provides the student with knowledge of the basic biology of the brain as well as the computational skills needed to simulate large-scale cognitive phenomena. The text consists of two parts. The first part covers basic neural computation mechanisms: individual neurons, neural networks, and learning mechanisms. The second part covers large-scale brain area organization and cognitive phenomena: perception and attention, memory, language, and higher-level cognition. The second part is relatively self-contained and can be used separately for mechanistically oriented cognitive neuroscience courses. Integrated throughout the text are more than forty different simulation models, many of them full-scale research-grade models, with friendly interfaces and accompanying exercises. The simulation software (PDP++, available for all major platforms) and simulations can be downloaded free of charge from the Web. Exercise solutions are available, and the text includes full information on the software.
A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.