DEADLINE EXTENDED: 18 Novemebr 2007
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CALL FOR PAPERS
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CONNECTION SCIENCE JOURNAL
Special Issue on SOCIAL LEARNING IN EMBODIED AGENTS
Guest Editors: Alberto Acerbi, Davide Marocco, Paul Vogt
Social learning refers to the process in which agents learn new skills by interacting with other agents. It is well known that many natural species have evolved a capacity to use information provided by other individuals to enhance their individual skills. However, only in the last decade research in artificial life, adaptive behavior, evolutionary robotics and, more generally, embodied dynamical systems started to focus explicitly on the features and outcomes of social learning dynamics. The artificial modeling of social learning allows researchers to shed new lights on a wide range of phenomena that play an important role in the evolution of complex behaviors in natural organisms and a fundamental role in the evolution of complex behaviors in humans.
When considering behavior as a complex outcome resulting form the interactions between different levels such as body, nervous system, and physical and social environment, an embodied approach to behavior seems particularly promising for the study of social learning phenomena as they typically depend on several hierarchical relationships.
Although a consistent number of successful social learning models have been realized in the past years, the field is still fragmented. The aim of the special issue is to point out the shared results and the common open issues in order to contribute to the definition of the specificity of the embodied approach to social learning.
Original papers - both tecnical and conceptual - on any aspect of embodied social learning are welcome. Topics include, but are not restricted to:
* Social learning and the evolution of communication
* Imitation in embodied agents
* Cultural evolutionary dynamics
* Interactions between genetic evolution, individual and social learning
* Relationship between individual behavior and populational dynamics
* Models of simple mechanisms of social learning
* Action, perception, and cognition in social interactions
* Cultural factors that affect social and individual behavior
* Niche construction in social environment
* Collective behavior in learning robot
* Teaching and scaffolding of behavior
* Dynamic role allocation
* Self organization in social learning
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
All manuscripts should be emailed to the guest editor (Alberto Acerbi, alberto.acerbi[at]istc.cnr.it). Instructions for authors are available from: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/ccosauth.asp.
IMPORTANT DATES
full paper submission :: 18 Novemebr 2007
review deadline :: 15 December 2007
notification of acceptance :: 21 December 2007
camera ready submission :: 28 February 2008
GUEST EDITORS
Alberto Acerbi
Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, Rome, Italy
web: http://laral.istc.cnr.it/acerbi/
Davide Marocco
Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, Rome, Italy
web: http://laral.istc.cnr.it/marocco/
Paul Vogt
Communication and Information Science, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
web: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv/
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
Connection Science is an interdisciplinary scientific journal with a focus on the mechanisms of adaptation, cognition and intelligent behaviour in both living and artificial systems. The traditional scope of the journal has been broadened from connectionist research and neural computing to encompass work on other adaptive methods (e.g. evolutionary computing) as well as biologically inspired techniques and algorithms in applied domains.
Papers submitted to the journal may be practical implementations, theoretical research or philosophical discussions. The submission of robotics research papers on issues raised by the interaction of agents with the environment or with other agents is particularly encouraged.