Dear colleagues,

For this new year, I am happy to announce the release of the Fall 2014 issue of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development. 

This is the biannual newsletter of the computational developmental sciences and developmental robotics community, studying mechanisms of lifelong learning and development in machines and humans.

It is available at:

Featuring:

=== “Trained on everything"

=== Dialog Initiated by Katharina Rohlfing, Britta Wrede and Gerhard Sagerer, with responses from Giulio Sandino and David Vernon, Franck Ramus and Thérèse Collins, Maha Salem, Juyang Weng, Thomas Schultz, and Christina Bergmann:

In the years to come, one very important challenge in developmental sciences is education. Taking an integrated and interdisciplinary approach requires to handle with dexterity concepts and methods from diverse scientific fields ranging from psychology, neuroscience, biology, robotics, computer science or mathematics. How can we grow a community of young researchers mastering the latest advances? How can we teach them to establish cross-disciplinary collaboration and impact? 

=== "Will social robots need to be consciously aware?”

=== New dialog initiated by Janet Wiles

A large research community is today working towards the objective of building robots capable of believable, relevant and useful social interaction with humans. We are far from understanding what “consciousness” is, but intuition tells us that it would be very difficult for an “unconscious” human to enter into a social interaction. So what about robots? At least can we identify levels of awareness (of the self, of others) which constitute a necessary basis on which to build social competence? Those of you interested in reacting to this dialog initiation are welcome to submit a response by March 30th, 2015. The length of each response must be between 600 and 800 words including references (contact pierre- yves.oudeyer@inria.fr).

Let me remind you that previous issues of the newsletter are all open-access and available at: http://www.cse.msu.edu/amdtc/amdnl/

I wish you a stimulating reading!

Best regards,

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,

Editor of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development
Research director, Inria

Head of Flower project-team

Inria and Ensta ParisTech, France