(archived from now-deleted website)
Purpose & Aims
The 1st International Workshop on Spatial Cognition and AI (SC&AI) will be the inaugural meeting of the Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence Working Group aimed to be established as part of TC12, the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and open to anybody interested in the topic. This Working Group, and consequently the 1st International Workshop on Spatial Cognition and AI, is born from the re-emerged need to bring together members of the international scientific community who work on both theoretical as well as applied overlapping research areas of the two fields.
Even though spatial cognition may be considered as the offspring of the overlapping research interests of cognitive science and AI in the realm of cognition that is concerned with space, in recent years we observed a period of weakening of the ‘visible’ links between the two fields. However, as evident from key publications from people involved in both areas, as well as early proceedings of the adjoining Spatial Cognition and other conferences, traditionally there has always been strong underlying research ties between the two fields.
We believe that in today’s era of deep learning and ‘black-box’ AI that appears in ‘spatial’ agents, such as self-driving vehicles, service robots, and interactive location based services (among others), the interdisciplinary nature of spatial cognition and its strong connection with AI may need to become more evident than ever. It takes a joint effort to make such cognitively inspired artificial systems a success.
In this spirit, the 1st SC&AI Workshop 2018 aims at bringing together researchers from different disciplines (e.g., AI & computer science, cognitive psychology & neuroscience, GIScience, cognitive geography & cartography, linguistics, philosophy of mind, architecture and design, engineering, mathematics, and others) to work on cognitively inspired spatial artificial systems.
Participation
Participation at the meeting is open to anybody interested, in principle.
Potential participants are asked to send a brief expression of to the workshop organizers, outlining
their background (e.g., scientific discipline(s), very brief outline of your work, etc.),
specific interests in linking spatial cognition and artificial intelligence (e.g., where and why do you see ‘the needs’, what would you hope to gain for your work, etc.),
and ideas for contributing during the meeting’s discussions (e.g., open questions or challenges, recent ‘successes’, etc.).
Please keep these expressions of interest to not more than two pages of text. Please send them to the email addresses stated in the sidebar the latest by the submission deadline (found also in the sidebar).
Brief outline of workshop activities
The workshop is designed to be highly interactive and (hopefully) highly interdisciplinary.
We will start with a keynote by Prof. Christian Freksa from the Bremen Spatial Cognition Center.
Activities will then partly be based on your expressions of interest and partly be framed around some (spatial cognition & AI) challenges, and will see participants being involved in interdisciplinary interaction.