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ICANN '07
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International Workshop on "What it means to communicate":
September 13, 2007
Ipanema Park Hotel, Porto, Portugal
Held in conjunction with ICANN ’07

This workshop will focus on the neural, computational and cognitive principles of communication. A wealth of new knowledge has been produced by recent research for instance as part of the EU NEST initiative “What it means to be human”. The goal of this workshop is to explore relevant research to focus on the question “what it means to communicate”. The general aim is to understand the neural, cognitive, social, computational and developmental features that have led to communication differences between humans and animals. A number of interesting and successful research directions have been supported including learning by imitation, examining the origin of human rule based reasoning, studying the neural origins of language, exploring the evolutionary origins of the human mind, researching into verbal and nonverbal communication, using and interpreting signs, characterising human language by structural complexity, and representing abstract concepts. To complement this, the NESTCOM project aims to understand the results of these projects and integrate them with a neural multimodal understanding of verbal and visual communication for embodied action understanding. This workshop will explore the characteristics of human communication and their relationship to the role of networks of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons appear to be central to action understanding, imitation and communication development and as such may go some way to explaining and unifying the results of earlier research. The workshop will include 2 invited introductory talks, about 10 short presentations by panel members and a discussion session with the workshop participants.

Contributors are asked to consider addressing the following three questions as part of their short panel statement. We encourage short, precise statements plus a longer discussion at the end of the workshop.

   1. What does it mean to communicate at a neural, psychological or social level?

   2. What are the theories that could be used to advance computational models of multimodal  communication?

   3. What new representations and processes are  needed to support more sophisticated models of multimodal communication in the future?

Some further suggested questions to be addressed:

· What does it mean to communicate?
· What are they key topics in multimodal integration?
· What are the next steps needed to achieve bioinspired communicating robotics?
· What are current developmental approaches to communication?
· What is the role of imitation in communication?
· What role do signs and gestures in communication?
· What is the role of mirror neuron system and its mechanisms?
· What are the key mechanisms for learning of action understanding?

It is envisaged that extended paper versions of the contributions shall be published at a later date in a book by Springer and a special issue e.g. in a journal like the Connection Science Journal. For the workshop presentation statements of 2-8 pages in length were required to be submitted as pdf file to Stefan.Wermter (at.) sunderland.ac.uk by 30 June 2007.