The Talking Heads Experiment, conducted in the years 1999-2001, was the first large-scale experiment in which open populations of situated embodied agents created for the first time ever a new shared vocabulary by playing language games about real world scenes in front of them. The agents could teleport to different physical sites in the world through the Internet. Sites, in Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Tokyo, London, Cambridge and several other locations were linked into the network. Humans could interact with the robotic agents either on site or remotely through the Internet and thus influence the evolving ontologies and languages of the artificial agents. The present book describes in detail the motivation, the cognitive mechanisms used by the agents, the various installations of the Talking Heads, the experimental results that were obtained, and the interaction with humans. It also provides a perspective on what happened in the field after these initial groundbreaking experiments. The book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the history of agent-based models of language evolution and the future of Artificial Intelligence.

One of the hardest problems in science is the symbol grounding problem, a question that has intrigued philosophers and linguists for more than a century. With the rise of artificial intelligence, the question has become very actual, especially within the field of robotics. The problem is that an agent, be it a robot or a human, perceives the world in analogue signals. Yet humans have the ability to categorise the world in symbols that they, for instance, may use for language. This book presents a series of experiments in which two robots try to solve the symbol grounding problem. The experiments are based on the language game paradigm, and involve real mobile robots that are able to develop a grounded lexicon about the objects that they can detect in their world. Crucially, neither the lexicon nor the ontology of the robots has been preprogrammed, so the experiments demonstrate how a population of embodied language users can develop their own vocabularies from scratch.

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102: "Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication". The research published in this book was discussed at the 3rd jointly EUCOGII-COST 2102 International Training School entitled "Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues ", held in Caserta, Italy, on March 15-19, 2010. The book is arranged into two scientific sections. The 18 revised papers of the first section, "Human-Computer Interaction: Cognitive and Computational Issues", deal with conjectural and processing issues of defining models, algorithms, and strategies for implementing cognitive behavioural systems. The second section, "Synchrony through Verbal and Nonverbal Signals", presents 21 revised lectures that provide theoretical and practical solutions to the modelling of timing synchronization between linguistic and paralinguistic expressions, actions, body movements, activities in human interaction and on their assistance for an effective communication.

"This book presents recent research efforts in Artificial Intelligence about building artificial systems capable of performing cognitive tasks. A fundamental issue addressed in this book is if these cognitive processes can have any meaningfulness to the artificial system being built"--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2003, held in Dortmund, Germany in September 2003. The 96 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 140 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial chemistries, self-organization, and self-replication; artificial societies; cellular and neural systems; evolution and development; evolutionary and adaptive dynamics; languages and communication; methodologies and applications; and robotics and autonomous agents.

The main topic of this volume is natural multimodal interaction. The book is unique in that it brings together a great many contributions regarding aspects of natural and multimodal interaction written by many of the important actors in the field. Topics addressed include talking heads, conversational agents, tutoring systems, multimodal communication, machine learning, architectures for multimodal dialogue systems, systems evaluation, and data annotation.

This is a study of how children acquire language and how this affects language change over generations. Written by an international team of experts, the volume proceeds from the basis that we can not only address the language faculty per se within the framework of evolutionary theory, but also the origins and subsequent development of languages themselves; languages evolve via cultural rather than biological transmission on a historical rather than genetic timescale. The book is distinctive in utilizing computational simulation and modelling to help ensure the theories constructed are complete and precise. Drawing on a wide range of examples, the book covers the why and how of specific syntactic universals; the nature of syntactic change; the language-learning mechanisms required to acquire an existing linguistic system accurately and to impose further structure on an emerging system; and the evolution of language(s) in relation to this learning mechanism.

The 13th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19–24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and g- ernmental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presen- tion thoroughly cover the entire field of human–computer interaction, addressing major advances in the knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of app- cation areas.

Robot learning is a broad and interdisciplinary area. This holds with regard to the basic interests and the scienti c background of the researchers involved, as well as with regard to the techniques and approaches used. The interests that motivate the researchers in this eld range from fundamental research issues, such as how to constructively understand intelligence, to purely application o- ented work, such as the exploitation of learning techniques for industrial robotics. Given this broad scope of interests, it is not surprising that, although AI and robotics are usually the core of the robot learning eld, disciplines like cog- tive science, mathematics, social sciences, neuroscience, biology, and electrical engineering have also begun to play a role in it. In this way, its interdisciplinary character is more than a mere fashion, and leads to a productive exchange of ideas. One of the aims of EWLR-6 was to foster this exchange of ideas and to f- ther boost contacts between the di erent scienti c areas involved in learning robots. EWLR is, traditionally, a \European Workshop on Learning Robots". Nevertheless, the organizers of EWLR-6 decided to open up the workshop to non-European research as well, and included in the program committee we- known non-European researchers. This strategy proved to be successful since there was a strong participation in the workshop from researchers outside - rope, especially from Japan, which provided new ideas and lead to new contacts.