The Nomination for Exploring Internal Simulations of Perception in a Mobile Robot using Abstractions by John Stening

The thesis presents experiments with a two-level neural net architecture intended to provide a simple mobile robot with capacities for (a) abstraction from sensorimotor flow to simple symbolic concepts, corresponding to 'corners', 'corridors', etc. (through unsupervised categorization), and (b) the prediction/imagination of future sequences of such conceptualizations.

Our motivation for nominating the thesis is that it combines the discussion of important theoretical issues in cognitive science and artificial intelligence (such as the nature of representation, grounding, etc.) with innovative experiments and a detailed analysis of the results. A paper that summarizes the work has been accepted for publication and presentation at the AISB 2005 Symposium on Machine Consciousness [1] (April, Hatfield, UK), and a second paper will be submitted to the European Conference on Artficial Life (ECAL, September, Canterbury, UK).

[1] J. Stening, H. Jacobsson & T. Ziemke (2005). Imagination and Abstraction of Sensorimotor Flow: Towards a Robot Model. In: Proceedings of the AISB 2005 Symposium on Machine Consciousness, April 2005. Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, UK.

Tom Ziemke