Developmental AI Task Force

of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive and Developmental Systems

Understanding physics is child's play when compared to understanding child's play.

Albert Einstein

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), Ana Tanevska (Uppsala, Sweden), Tadahiro Taniguchi (Kyoto, Japan), Jochen Triesch (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (Chair), Justin N. Wood (Bloomingtion, USA), Samantha Wood (Bloomington, USA), Chen Yu (Austin, USA).

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!

2024

2023