Developmental AI Task Force

Motivation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have come a long way in recent years and now they perform many challenging real-world tasks. However, they still have only limited human-like "common sense" and lack the flexible and general intelligence that allow humans to solve myriads of new problems in an instant. Furthermore, these AI systems do not yet exhibit a human-like form of consciousness. The foundations for these human capacities are formed during our cognitive development as infants and children. This development relies on active exploration and interaction with the physical and social environment, fostered by drives to experiment with, better understand, and better control the world around us. Is it possible to build AI systems that can learn in a similar way? Will such artificial systems develop a human-like common sense and flexible and general intelligence and ultimately a human-like consciousness? Will this help us better understand the processes of cognitive development in human infants and children? 

Mission

The Developmental AI Task Force brings together scientists interested in the above questions. It is one of the task forces of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. It aims to promote research at the interface of Artificial Intelligence and Human Cognitive Development by, e.g.,  organizing conferences, workshops, journal special issues as well as tutorials and competitions on relevant topics. Members of the task force also organize the Developing Minds global online lecture series. The task force has been established in 2023.

Current Members

David Crandall (Bloomington, USA), Verena Hafner (Berlin, Germany), Brenden Lake (New York, USA), Georg Martius (Tübingen, Germany), Yukie Nagai (Tokyo, Japan), Alexandre Pitti (Cergy-Pontoise, France), Tadahiro Taniguchi (Kyoto, Japan), Jochen Triesch (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (Chair), Justin N. Wood (Bloomingtion, USA), Samantha Wood (Bloomington, USA), Chen Yu (Austin, USA).

Former Members

Ana Tanevska (Uppsala, Sweden)

Join Us

If you'd like to contribute to our effort by helping us to organize workshops, tutorials, journal special issues, etc., or if you have other ideas for how to grow and promote our community, please contact us and join the fun!

Recent/Ongoing Activities

Check out our Developing Minds global online lecture series!

2025

• Samantha Wood is co-organizing a workshop (with Hadar Raz) at ICDL titled Robots, Infants, and Chicks: Embodied Learning Mechanisms in the Real World

• Yukie Nagai is serving as a Publicity Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impact, which will be held in July 2025

• David Crandall is co-organizing the Second Joint Egocentric Vision (EgoVis) Workshop at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2025

• Verena Hafner is co-organising a workshop at Ro-Man (IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication) in August 2025 in Eindhoven on Movement Matters – A Turing Test for Robot Interaction

• Alexandre Pitti is organizing a symposium on AI and Consciousness in Paris in June

• Georg Martius organizing the 18th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL) in Tübingen in September

• Jochen Triesch is co-organizing a workshop on Digital Twins in Frankfurt in September with Samantha Wood as an invited speaker

• David Crandall is one of the 5 Associate Program Chairs for AAAI 2026.

• Jochen Triesch is part of the organization team of a challenge for the IEEE Int. Conf. on Development and Learning featuring MIMo, the multimodal infant model

• Alexandre Pitti is co-organizing the "Sensorimotor Interaction, Language and Embodiment of Symbols (SMILES) workshop" at the  IEEE Int. Conf. on Development and Learning

• Georg Martius organized the 11th International Conference on Guided Self-Organization, which took place during 12-14 February 2025 in Tübingen, Germany. The main theme of GSO-2025 is "Guided Self-Organization: Machine Learning in Embodied Agents".

• Yukie Nagai, Jochen Triesch, and Chen Yu are organizing the Developinng Minds global online lecure series.

2024

• Yukie Nagai is General Chair of the 24th Congress of the Japanese Society of Baby Science in Tokyo, Japan in August 2024.

• David Crandall is Program Chair of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024.

• Chen Yu is organizing the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) 2024 in Austin, Texas, USA.  David Crandall is among the Program Chairs. 

• Ana Tanevska was a co-organizer of the ICDL 2024 workshop Architecting Intelligence: Exploring Intersections in Cognitive Robotics and Developmental Learning  [AI: CogDev] in May 2024, with Jochen Triesch and Yukie Nagai as the keynote speakers.

• Yukie Nagai, Jochen Triesch, and Chen Yu are organizing the Developinng Minds global online lecure series.

2023

• Tadahiro Taniguchi, Yukie Nagai, et al. organized the workshop "World Models and Predictive Coding in Cognitive Robotics" at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023).

• Alexandre Pitti is organizing the 4th NeuroDevRob workshop: "Developmental AI, Cognitive Robotics, Cognitive Sciences and Neurosciences" at Cergy Paris University, France, in December 2023.

• Georg Martius is co-organizing IMOL 2023, the Sixth International Workshop on Intrinsically-Motivated Open-ended Learning.

• David Crandall is program chair of the IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2023).

• Yukie Nagai, Jochen Triesch, and Chen Yu are organizing the Developinng Minds global online lecure series.