Affordances 2014 - First Workshop on Affordances: Affordances in Vision for Cognitive Robotics

Based on the Gibsonian principle of defining objects by their function, "affordances" have been studied extensively by psychologists and visual perception researchers, resulting in the creation of numerous cognitive models. These models are being increasingly revisited and adapted by computer vision and robotics researchers to build cognitive models of visual perception and behavioral algorithms in recent years. This workshop attempts to explore this nascent, yet rapidly emerging field of affordance based cognitive robotics while integrating the efforts and language of affordance communities not just in computer vision and robotics, but also psychophysics and neurobiology by creating an open affordance research forum, feature framework and ontology called AfNet (theaffordances.net). In particular, the workshop will focus on emerging trends in affordances and other human-centered function/action features that can be used to build computer vision and robotic applications. The workshop also features contributions from researchers involved in traditional theories to affordances, especially from the point of view of psychophysics and neuro-biology. Avenues to aiding research in these fields using techniques from computer vision and cognitive robotics will also be explored. Primary topics addressed by the workshop include the following among others
Affordances in visual perception models
Affordances as visual primitives, common coding features and symbolic cognitive systems
Affordances for object recognition, search, attention modulation, functional scene understanding/ classification
Object functionality analysis
Affordances from appearance and touch based cues
Haptic adjectives
Functional-visual categories for transfer learning
Actions and functions in object perception
Human-object interactions and modeling
Motion-capture data analysis for object categorization
Affordances in human and robot grasping
Robot behavior for affordance learning
Execution of affordances on robots
Affordances to address cognitive and domestic robot applications
Affordance ontologies
Psychophysics of affordances