CFP: Workshop on Culture and Cognition - An Enactive View

Another call for participation that should be of interest, especially for members of the euCognition network.

Cheers,
Tom

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A workshop on the topic of “Culture and Cognition: An Enactive View” will be held in Bristol, UK on December 5th and 6th.

The purpose of this workshop is to help to develop a robust vocabulary and set of concepts that are capable of sustaining dialogue between researchers in cognitive systems, cognitive science, arts, media, and culture by using the insights and approaches of the enactive approach to cognition.

There is a website devoted to the workshop at http://cultureandcognition.ucd.ie.

Prospective participants can make their interest known by providing their email and a statement of interest at the website.

All interested parties can register to participate in forum discussions.

This workshop is funded by euCognition, and members will be able to claim participation costs under the usual euCognition rules (see http://www.eucognition.org for details).

Fred Cummins and Bill Sharpe
Workshop organizers

CFP: Enaction Summer School 2009

I’m forwarding the call for participation in next year’s Enaction Summer School below. For information about the previous summer schools, please click here.

Cheers,
Tom

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Hello everybody.

As agreed, we will be organizing in 2009 a new Summer School on Enaction and Cognitive Science which will take place from 21-30 July in Bangalore, India, in the buildings of the National Institute of
Advanced Studies (NIAS). You will find attached a very brief presentation of the project. The list of invited speakers is not yet finalized: for the moment we are contacting Arindam Chakrabarti
(University of Hawaii), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (University of Lancaster), Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (University of Oregon), Michel Bitbol (CREA, Paris).

We are deliberately sending you this message before the summer so that you will have time to consider your possible participation. The cost will be approximately 1500 euros (travel included), but this year we will probably not have financial support (although we are making some requests), so we will probably not be able to help you financially. In addition, we have not planned any particular selection of participants. However, since it is a School, if the requests are too numerous we will give priority to young scientists.

We would like to receive notice of your firm intention to participate by the end of September at the latest, and we will need a definite decision (with financial engagement) before the end of the year. Do
not hesitate to spread this information.

Meanwhile: have a good summer!
Olivier Gapenne

Seminar #37: The Myth of the Inner, the Myth of the Hidden

Sorry for the late notice! For those who missed this seminar, an audio recording can be found here.

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There will be a Life and Mind seminar on Wednesday, the 4th of June, 16:30-18:00, Room Pev1 1A03.

This time we are pleased to have our very own Prof. Steve Torrance lead a Life and Mind discussion. One of Steve’s main interests is to examine the links between mind and value, and how far consciousness science necessarily interacts with ethics. In particular, he is looking at the ethical ramifications of artificial consciousness and has very recently edited a special journal issue on this topic for the Journal of AI & Society (2008, vol. 22). He is also interested in enactive or embodied approaches to mind and has recently edited two special journal issues on the enactive approach to cognitive science for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2007, vol. 4 and 2005, vol. 4).

Today Steve will talk to us about:

“The Myth of the Inner; the Myth of the Hidden”

This seminar will be based on a talk recently given at the 2008 Ratna Ling Conference on First-Person Methodologies in the Study of Consciousness. Technology permitting, there might be some surprise musical performance involved!

For anyone who missed the talk, an audio recording can be found here.

CFP: Enactive 2008

I thought the following call for papers might be of interest:

- Tom

ENACTIVE08: 1st Call for Participation

Conference: Pisa, Italy 20-21 November 2008

http://www.enactive2008.org/

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Dear all, we would like to invite you to participate in the 5th Enactive International Conference (ENACTIVE 2008).

ENACTIVE08 is a major international conference and an important meeting occasion for researchers in the field of Enactive Interfaces. Enactive Interfaces and Systems are a new generation of human-computer interfaces that are based on the concept of Enactive knowledge, that is the knowledge acquired by doing. These new interfaces allow to make old applications more intelligent and responsive and to create new kinds of applications. The introduction of this concept in HCI has created a multidisciplinary research community capable of integrating theoretical model with interaction paradigms and advanced technologies like visualization systems, haptics and spatialized audio.

The program committee now kindly invites researchers, innovators and theorists to submit papers and posters in all the topics related to Enactive Interfaces, Interaction and Systems, including but not limited to the following areas:

New look and invitation to participate

Dear Lifeandminders,

I want to draw attention to the new look and re-worked functionality of our blog. Thanks to Eduardo, Mike, Tom, Marieke and Hanne for their work and input about this. Our idea is to make the blog less cluttered, easier to read and use, and hopefully visually more stimulating by encouraging people to use more images.

But, more importantly, we would like to encourage more participation in the form of relevant stories, work-in-progress, interesting comments or news. So far the blog is used mainly for announcing speakers. Sometimes the discussions that emerge from talks carry on in the form of comments. But we would like to encourage spontaneous discussions about important topics related to life and mind, enactive cognition, philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology. The boundaries are hard to define, but a look at previous posts will give you an idea of what is considered a topic that will interest the users of the blog.

Whilst we would like to maintain the quality of the posts (typically abstracts are well worked-out and often include links to published work), we think that discussing current work-in-progress or events can indeed enhance the quality of the blog as tool for thinking and communicating. It will be important to prevent it from “degenerating” into a news board or a chat space, but I’m confident that this will simply not happen.

So, tell us your ideas.

Ezequiel