This is a continuation of my thesis, which you can read here.
And the original proposal is over here.
There's even a CV,
for those of you who would like to offer me my dream job. After I finish my PhD, of course.
The thesis is supervised by Prof.
Kai-Uwe Kuehnberger, and I've
been working closely with Roul
S. John. Both are great guys, so
don't hesitate to click on the links. They even have photos on
their
websites. Roul also has some cool things he has written on
his
website, most of which I agree with scientifically. Unfortunately it's
in German.
What I want to do is model symbol use and generation with embodied
agents.
Why
symbols? Because you don't
have sophisticated (i.e. human level) intelligence without them, it
seems, and I believe that symbols and symbolic behavior don't come out
from the blue. They should be modelled just like any other kind of
behavior.
Why
embodied agents? First of
all, I take embodied
to mean
something very simple: physical,
i.e. robotic.
There are a
number of reasons for prefering robots, but the following two are the
most important, in my humble opinion:
- Practical: They force one to
take into account motoric and
sensory aspects of intelligence
- Theoretical: Embodied
experience provides the common context in
which all content can be grounded. (Stated crudely here. If you want to
have a better idea, have a look at Richard Dreyfus' work).
For the details see my thesis and proposal; they have a lot more to offer. |
Publications
-
Türkmen, U. and Zugic,
R. (2008)). Modelling
the social coordiantion of behavior with public
symbols. In Bullock, S., Noble, J., Watson, R., and Bedau,
M.A., editors, Artificial Life XI: Proceedings of the Eleventh
International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of
Living Systems, page 812. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Türkmen, U. (2007a). Situated
representations and the modelling of the evolution of
language. In Frings, C., Mecklinger, A., Opitz, B.,
Pospeschill, M., Wentura, D., and Zimmer, H. D., editors,
Kognitionsforschung 2007: Beiträge zur 8. Jahrestagung der
Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft, Aachen. Shaker
Verlag.
- John, R. S., Türkmen, U., Zugic, R., and Werner,
C. W. (2007). Alife and pecking: Applying the comparative cognitive
robotics framework to chicken intelligence. Submitted to ECAL2007, 9th
European Conference on Artificial Life.
- John, R. S., Türkmen, U., and Zugic, R. (2006). Comparative
cognitive robotics: Autonomous robots as empirical models of animal
learning. In Payette, N. and Hardy-Vallée, B., editors, Proceedings of
Cognitio 2006: Beyond the brain: embodied, situated & distributed
cognition.
- John, R. S., Werner, C. W., and Türkmen, U. (2005). Implementation of an empirical robot model of discrimination learning. In Opwis, K. and Penner, I.-K., editors, Proceedings of KogWis05: The German Cognitive Science Conference 2005, Basel. Schwabe Verlag.
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