MCP 2014 - AAAI Fall Symposium on Modeling Changing Perspectives: Reconceptualizing Sensorimotor Experiences

There is no property absolutely essential to one thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon another. Now that I am writing, it is essential that I conceive my paper as a surface for inscription. [...] But if I wished to light a fire, and no other materials were by, the essential way of conceiving the paper would be as a combustible material. [...] The essence of a thing is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest. [...] The properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour. [...] Many objects of daily use ? as paper, ink, butter, overcoat ? have properties of such constant unwavering importance, and have such stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way. Those are no truer ways of conceiving them than any others; there are only more frequently serviceable ways to us.
? William James
Human perception is highly contextual: a perceptual stimulus can be viewed by a human in radically divergent ways depending on the context. In contrast, most AI approaches employ processes that creativity theorists would consider convergent, insofar as they search for a single best or optimal answer. This ability to fluidly change perspectives and dynamically reframe a stimulus is a key aspect of human perception and reasoning that we seek to understand in AI terms
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Divergent choices can be made at the boundaries of different representations and computational levels, so this symposium will focus on the representational basis of divergent thinking that allows humans to change perspectives and reconceptualize stimuli with ease. For cognitive systems need to interpret low-level experiences (for example, neuronal, physiological, sensorimotor) using high-level concepts (for example, belief, intention, identity). Recent advances in bottom-up machine learning allow computational systems to go from low-level sensor data up to useful higher-level features. However, humanlike cognition also requires a top-down process to meaningfully frame our perceptual experiences. Crucially, such top-down processes allow an agent to interpret an object or an experience in divergent ways. This divergence is closely related to imaginative play and may also be integral to modeling social phenomena like empathy, since empathy demands we adopt another's viewpoint and see things via a different lens.
This symposium will explore the following questions from the crossdisciplinary perspective of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and cognitive robotics:
1. How might we model divergently unconventional perspectives in a top-down fashion in robotics, AI or machine-vision systems? Though top-down approaches have been used in machine-vision from the get-go in model-driven approaches, the emphasis has been on establishing a convergent ground truth. This symposium will instead focus on how divergent departures from the convergent norm yield creative and playful reinterpretations. In play, an agent deliberately projects a conceptual organization onto an object for which it is not conventionally suited, so that overlooked properties become newly salient and thus suggest novel creative insights.
2. How are social attributes such as empathy, fairness, identity, cooperation and the self/other distinction anchored in the mechanisms of playful reframing and reconceptualization? How might a theory of mind emerge from these mechanisms?
We also welcome papers on these topics:
Modeling mental fluidity/agility
Shifting perspectives via Analogy
Creative tool use in, and by, robots
Generating playful interpretations of images
Considering another's perspective in social interaction
Cognitive development of the ability to reframe and shift perspectives
Pretense play (including jokes and ironic language) and creative problem solving
Computational models of creative leaps via bisociation, blending, metaphor
Format
The symposium will consist of paper presentations, posters, and a panel-led discussion.
Submissions
Short papers (2000 words) or regular papers (3000 to 6000 words).
Organizing Committee
Georgi Stojanov (The American University of Paris, France), Bipin Indurkhya (AGH University of Science and Technology, Cracow, Poland), Frank Guerin (University of Aberdeen, Scotland), Tony Veale (University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland)