[CogSci] [meetings] Final CFP Papers/posters, Call for participation Workshop on Language Learning in children and robots at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB

[Michael Spranger]

Call for Posters/Call for participation (apologies for multiple postings)

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Final CFP Call for Papers/Posters: Workshop on Language Learning at ICDL
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Monday, September 18th 2017 Lisbon, Portugal

https://sites.google.com/view/epirob2017language

This workshop is part of the 2017 IEEE ICDL-EPIROB conference (ICDL-EPIROB 2017)
http://www.icdl-epirob.org

The posters give researchers a chance to present their new, ongoing and/or recently finished work. We particularly would like to invite young researchers to present their work. Also acceptable is recent work published elsewhere on the topic of the workshop. The workshop gives ample opportunity to discuss various approaches in developmental language learning with senior researchers and get valuable feedback and inspirations.

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Important Dates
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Sep 15, 2017, Deadline for Abstract submission
Sep 17, 2017, Notification of acceptance (if you sent an abstract, we will decide within 1 day whether it can be presented at the workshop)

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Workshop Topic
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Language Learning

Children acquire language by interacting with their social and physical environment. When children start to talk using language, their sensory-motor intelligence, visual and auditory perception, body movement, navigation, object manipulation, and articulatory control, has already developed a high level of competence. Together with social support, these competences and growing representations provide a basis for the ongoing development of communication. Emerging skills such as basic turn-taking, establishing eye-contact and first systematic vocalizations like canonical babbling significantly shape early social interactions. 
These interactions are multimodal in nature and vary across contexts. Especially early communicative exchange can be characterized by the fact that different, not necessarily conventional, means are applied. This fact is intriguing for the research on symbol emergence: How do participants choose and agree on particular means? How do the means become conventionalized? 

Concerning the context, within which interaction takes place, it can vary not only across developmental time and situations within individuals, but also between individuals, socio-economic groups and cultures. Continuously, representations become further enriched in ongoing interactions and across different contexts.
Importantly, continuously acquiring knowledge in different multimodal contexts and being able to continuously enrich the underlying representations provides a potential powerful mechanism (cross-situational learning) which is already well recognized in learning in children. Nonetheless, we need to know more about how children recognize contexts and how their language learning benefits from different language use varying across contexts. 

Even though there are various efforts in developmental robotics to model communication, the emergence of symbolic communication is still an unsolved problem. We are still lacking convincing theories and implementations that show how cooperation and interaction skills could emerge in long-term experiments with populations of robotic agents. 

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Structure of Workshop
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The workshop is a full day workshop with three sessions of two-three talks each. All posters will be presented in a lightning talk around before the workshop. We finish the workshop with a poster session.

Speakers:
* Afra Alihashi (U Tilburg, The Netherlands) 
* Angelo Cangelosi (U Plymouth, UK)
* Iris Nomikou (U Portsmouth,UK)
* Junko Kanero (Koç University, Turkey)
* Kirsten Bergmann (UBielfeld, Germany)
* Max Garagnani (Goldsmith, UK)
* Pierre Yves Oudeyer (INRIA Bordeaux, France)
* Takayuki Nagai (U Electro-Communications, Tokyo)

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Submission and Publication
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We invite short abstracts (around 200 words) for the workshop. The accepted abstracts will be presented in a poster session. We want to give researchers a chance to present their (ongoing) work. But we also want to provide a forum for relevant work that has recently been published in journals and other conferences.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the organizers. 

Publication: Suitable posters will be invited to submit their work to an upcoming special issue in TCDS

Submission: send your abstracts to languagelearningcontact at gmail.com

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Organizers
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Chen Yu (Indiana University, USA)
Katharina J. Rohlfing (Paderborn University, Germany)
Malte Schilling (CITEC Bielefeld, Germany)
Michael Spranger (Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc, Japan)
Paul Vogt (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)
Tadahiro Taniguchi (Ritsumeikan University, Japan)

For more information contact languagelearningcontact at gmail.com and see our webpage https://sites.google.com/view/epirob2017language