Creating an Artificial Brain

There is an upsurge of interest in the attempt to build an artificial brain. This is for several reasons:

• i) The enormous increase of computing power over the last decade or so;
• ii) The increased understanding of the brain arising from developments in brain imaging and single cell recordings and the associated use of probing psychological paradigms;
• iii) The increased demands from industry in terms of the creation of autonomous agents with some form of cognitive powers, even up to that of "conscious" machines.

An important aspect of this general advance is that guidance is being taken from the higher processing power of the brain, to help produce systems with a similar or even greater power. In so doing an overlap is now growing between machine intelligence per se and computational neuroscience, with projects being guided by global brain processing as observed by neuroscience. Already several such projects, using clusters of up to ten thousand nodes are being pursued; with the largest such cluster of 150,000 nodes indicating what is now available.

This workshop proposes to explore the issues raised in following such an avenue:

1. The nature of the global brain itself, and the data relevant to help guide us forward;
2. The problems of the level at which to base any such approach, in terms of neuron complexity, connectivity levels, number of separate modules, learning rules, use of neuro-modulators, range of brain science data to be explained or incorporated in any model;
3. The problems of size and speed of the resulting computation, and whether to aim for real-time or off-line learning and responses
4. How to incorporate the faculties of attention, emotion and memory in an input-output system able to develop concepts and to ultimately be able to "think for itself".

Applications are welcome for proposed talks in the workshop (which will last one day).
Please send suggestions (title, author co-ordinates and abstract) to the organizers at john.g.taylor@kcl.ac.uk and ASWDuch@ntu.edu.sg.

We look forward to seeing you at the Workshop!
For details on the venue and organization please see:
http://www.ibspan.waw.pl/ICANN-2005/workshops.html

Preliminary list of the speakers:
10:00 Opening of all 3 workshops, about 15 minutes.

1. John Taylor: From Real to Artificial Brains: A Route to the Future.
2. Stathis Kasderidis: Modelling attention.
3. Wlodzislaw Duch: Large-scale projects to build artificial brains.
4. Eörs Szathmáry: Evolving artificial "brains": a biomimetic Evolutionary Neuro-Genetic Algorithm (ENGA) and its testing in simple games
5. Leszek Rybicki: Artificial Life biots based on Boltzman Machines
6. Petro Gopych: An 'atom' of consciousness model and its application to computer modeling feeling and emotions.
7. Vassilis Cutsuridis:
8. Andrzej Cichocki: RIKEN plans
9. Marc de Kamps:
10. General discussion, short presentations.

Lunch break: 13:00, provided at the venue.

Evening party: 19:00, Hotel Spichrz (alas, at individual expense ...)