IWINAC 2007 Workshop on

La Manga del Mar Menor, Murcia (Spain), June 18-21, 2007

This interdisciplinary one-day workshop takes place in the context of IWINAC 2007 (http://www.iwinac.uned.es/iwinac2007), the second edition of a conference that inherits the 14-year-long tradition of IWANN (http://www.iwinac.uned.es/prev-iwann.html), in bringing together researchers and practitioners from technology and life sciences.

Recent progress in biologically-inspired robotics suggests that the interplay between robotic research and the current understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the behavior of living organisms is a very promising track to be followed. Interaction between the two fields is useful for both robotics research, which can take inspiration from biological solutions to engineering problems, and neuroscience, that can benefit from artificial emulation of biological mechanisms which can prove the validity of research hypothesis. Our previous Workshop on Robotics and Neurobiology (http://www.robot.uji.es/research/events/iwinac05), organized within IWINAC2005, brought successfully together researchers in neurobiology and robotics. The positive outcome of that experience encouraged us in following the path towards further progress in this interdisciplinary domain through mutual cross-fertilization.

List of topics

The workshop is open to any paper addressing issues relevant to the interplay between robotics and neuroscience.
The topics of this workshop thus include, but are not limited to, those appearing in the following list:

• Spinal circuitry and arm dynamics
• Reinforcement learning and the basal ganglia
• Active learning and exploration
• Supervised learning and the cerebellum
• Visuomotor coordination in flying insects/robots

• The dorsal and ventral visual pathways
• Models of feature perception and integration in visual systems
• Neural coding for motor control
• The role of spinal cord, cerebellum and basal ganglia in motor control
• Active and goal-oriented perception
• Exploratory motions and image flow
• Attentional mechanisms: saccades and selective visual attention
• Visuomotor coordination in heads
• The vestibulo-ocular reflex

• Visual stabilization and corollary discharge
• Visual localization and remapping
• Rhythmic behaviors, Central and Motor Pattern Generators
• Eye-hand coordination for reaching and grasping
• Encoding goal-directed movement motor commands
• Representation of objects and grasps in the cortex
• Infant development of reaching/grasping skills
• Epigenetic robotics
• The hippocampus: spatial representation, navigation and learning

• Chronic, multisite and multi-electrode recording techniques
• Data analysis of neural ensemble recordings
• Neuroprosthetics for restoring motor and perceptual deficits
• Intersensory transfer and sensory plasticity
• Non-invasive brain-machine interfaces
• Brain-Machine Interfaces for reaching and grasping
• Models of motor control for integration into neuroprosthetics
• Human-Machine haptics
• Perceptual-motor systems and imitation

• Perception of postures, gestures, and actions performed by others
• Coupling between perceptual and motor systems in perceiving others
• The neural mirror system: data and models
• Learning by imitation and social robots

Emilia Barakova, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
e.i.barakova@tue.nl

Eris Chinellato, Universitat Jaume I, Spain
eris@icc.uji.es

Angel P. del Pobil, Universitat Jaume I, Spain
pobil@icc.uji.es

Publication

Accepted papers will be considered as regular IWINAC papers and published in the proceedings as a volume in the Springer LNCS/LNAI series.

Submissions

If you plan to submit a paper please follow the author guidelines for the IWINAC conference:

To be accepted in this special session, an abstract of the paper should be sent (as soon as possible) to the above three email addresses. Then, upon agreement of the session organizers, the final paper can be submitted through the official conference website before the February 15 deadline. Please send a copy by email also to the session organizers.

Since this is an interdisciplinary workshop involving quite diverse fields, authors should make an effort to make their papers accessible to outsiders to their field, for instance by including a quick introduction at the beginning of the article.