Invited Talks
Jochen Triesch
Talk title: "The Developmental Route to Synthetic Consciousness"
Talk abstract: Few scientific questions are as profound as the question of consciousness. What exactly is it? How do our brains generate conscious experience? How does it emerge during the cognitive development of a child? Last but not least, can machines be conscious and, if so, should we really attempt to build them this way? In this talk, I will outline a „pragmatic“ research program designed to make progress on these questions. At its heart is a decomposition of consciousness into a set of interlinked functional building blocks solving specific computational problems faced by an agent with limited physical and cognitive resources.
Biography
Jochen Triesch received his Diploma and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Bochum, Germany. After two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Computer Science Department of the University of Rochester, NY, USA, he joined the faculty of the Cognitive Science Department at UC San Diego, USA as an Assistant Professor in 2001. In 2005 he became a Fellow of the newly founded Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 2006 he received a Marie Curie Excellence Center Award of the European Union. Since 2007 he is the Johanna Quandt Chair for Theoretical Life Sciences at FIAS. He also holds professorships at the Department of Physics and the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research interests span Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, and Developmental Robotics/AI.
Yukie Nagai
Talk title: "Interplay of Learning and Scaffolding in Human and Robot Development"
Talk abstract: Caregivers’ scaffolding is fundamental to infant development, providing structured input through exaggerated speech and actions, coordinated behaviors, and synchronized interactions. However, despite advancements in robot learning inspired by infant development, the concept of scaffolding remains underexplored in computational models. This talk highlights the critical interplay between learning and scaffolding in both humans and robots. I will present a series of studies illustrating the significant impact of synchronized learning and scaffolding on cognitive development.
Biography
Yukie Nagai is a Project Professor at the International Research Center for Neurointelligence at the University of Tokyo. She earned her Ph.D. in Engineering from Osaka University in 2004, after which she worked at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Bielefeld University, and then Osaka University. Since 2019, she has been leading the Cognitive Developmental Robotics Lab at the University of Tokyo. Her research encompasses cognitive developmental robotics, computational neuroscience, and assistive technologies for developmental disorders. Dr. Nagai employs computational methods to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms involved in social cognitive development. In acknowledgment of her work, she received the titles of "World's 50 Most Renowned Women in Robotics" in 2020 and "35 Women in Robotics Engineering and Science" in 2022, among other recognitions.