The Poeticon: languages of sensorimotor representations and

Google Tech Talks May, 21 2008 ABSTRACT Reproducing an act with sensorimotor means and using fine natural language for communicating the intentionality behind the act is what Aristotle called "Poetics". POETICON explores the "poetics of everyday life", i.e. the synthesis of sensorimotor representations and natural language in everyday human interaction. This is related to an old problem in Artificial Intelligence on how meaning emerges, which is approached here in a new way. POETICON follows an empirical approach for discovering the "languages" of sensorimotor representations and the correspondences with natural language; guided by experiments in psychology and neuroscience, it employs cutting-edge equipment and established cognitive protocols for collecting face and body movement measurements, visual object information and associated linguistic descriptions from interacting human subjects, with a two-fold objective: a) The creation of the PRAXICON, an extensible computational resource which associates symbolic representations (words/concepts) with corresponding sensorimotor representations and that is enriched with information on patterns among these representations for forming conceptual structures. b) The exploration of the association of symbolic and sensorimotor representations through cognitive and neurophysiological experiments and experimentation with a humanoid as driving forces and implementation tools for the development of the PRAXICON, respectively. POETICON views a cognitive system as a set of different languages (the spoken, the motor, the vision language and so on) and provides a set of tools for parsing, generating and translating among them. Through inter-disciplinary research, it contributes to the exploration of what integration in human cognition is and how it can be reproduced by intelligent agents. This is an ambitious first step for revealing and conquering the "poetics of everyday life". * Research funded by the European Union, under the Cognitive Systems Program. Speaker: Professor Yiannis Aloimonos Yiannis Aloimonos is Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D from the University of Rochester in 1987. He is credited for the theoretical foundations of Active Vision and the discovery (with Minas Spetsakis of York University, Canada) of geometric constraints in multiple view vision, such as the trilinear constraints and others. His research interests include 3D vision (multiview geometry, structure from motion, active vision, video processing), vision processes underlying the perception of space and objects, and the interpretation and understanding of actions.