Events in 2007

Creating Brain-like Intelligence - International Symposium

The Creating Brain-like Intelligence Symposium took place in the Hofgut Georgenthal from the 1st of February to the 3rd of February 2007.

From The Welcome Message

This symposium aspires to be a special event in several respects. Firstly, 50 plus one year after the birth of Artificial Intelligence during the “Dartmouth summer research project” organised by John McCarthy it seems to be the perfect time to analyse where we stand. We have all witnessed the coming and going of several forecasts and predictions how and when intelligent systems will become reality. After tremendous advances in fields like neural networks, computational intelligence, fuzzy systems and artificial intelligence, we are still not able to mimic even the lower level sensory capabilities of humans or other animals.

Furthermore, we want to ask what the biggest obstacles in our way are and what the hypotheses are which we can formulate to circumvent these obstacles and to gain ground towards autonomy, flexibility, robustness and all those keywords that try to describe the marvellous performance of biological systems as they strive to survive.

We believe, thirdly, that new principles for the self-organisation and the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of complex systems and principles for learning within such systems will be necessary. Furthermore, these principles can only be found in the interaction and the open discourse between disciplines. This is why we have invited researchers from many different disciplines who we know are open to enter into discussions that go beyond their usual field of research. We are very happy that not one of you has turned down our invitation and we do sincerely hope that these couple of days will only be the starting point of a dynamic community that stays in contact and continues to strive towards cross-disciplinary thinking to crack the basic principles behind information processing in the brain and – even broader – in biological systems in general.

Finally, we hope that you will enjoy this symposium and that in the presentations, discussions and the workgroup activities some ideas will be seeded in all of our brains helping towards a better understanding of them.

Edgar Körner and Bernhard Sendhoff
Honda Research Institute Europe

List of speakers

Olaf Sporns, Indiana University, USA
Helge Ritter, University of Bielefeld, Germany
Kenji Doya, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Japan
Jürgen Jost, Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
Rolf Pfeifer, University of Zürich, Switzerland
Andreas K. Engel, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
Hod Lipson, Cornell University, USA
Dario Floreano, École Polytechnique Fédèrale de Lausanne
Gustavo Deco, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Jun Tani, Riken, Japan
Rajesh Rao, University of Washington, USA
Kunihiko Kaneko, Tokyo University, Japan

The Abstract Book

There are a few abstract books left, please contact us if you are interested.

The Conference Post-Proceedings

There will be an edited book with chapters from speakers and participants of the CBLI symposium in 2008. Further information will be published on our web pages as soon as they are available. Please contact us if you have any additional inquiries.