EAI Workshop and Recent Saturday Morning NeuroSim Conversations

Published in

Orthogonal Research and Education Lab

3 min readMar 19, 2021

OREL will be present at the Embodied AI workshop next week register for free). We have three presentations related to ongoing work in the lab. In the Kinds of Intelligence session on Wednesday March 24th at 17:00 GMT, Jesse Parent will present on ‘A Decade in Review: computational modeling of embodied cognition”. This is a part of the Cognition Futures project. In the Open Crazy Topics session (Thursday March 25th at 12:00 GMT), Stefan Dvoretskii and Bradly Alicea (me) will present on two topics: “Modeling Neural Development with Braitenberg Vehicles” and “Approaches to Developmental Embodied Neurosimulation”. These are part of the Developmental Braitenberg Vehicles and Developmental AI projects, respectively.

There are also two discussions from our weekly meetings that are also of potential interest to a wider audience. First up is a discussion from our March 6th meeting on two methodological rivalries: the first is an observational critique contrasting Bayesianism and Cybernetics, which leads into a Trends in Cognitive Science debate between Bayesianism and Connectionism.

The second discussion is from our March 13th meeting on linguistic change and theoretical change in interdisciplinary science. The discussion includes contemplation of how the language of regulation/function in Neuroscience may have evolved away from a Cybernetics common ancestor. Then the conversation moves towards the historical contingency and potential inevitability of Darwinian natural selection.