SoAIR2019

Invited Speakers

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• Michael Spranger, Sony CSL, Japan

Title: Learning to communicate - From acquisition to emergence
Abstract : The talk will review models and robot experiments for the acquisition and emergence of language. I will examine the role of embodiment and social interactions structure in the reinvention of language. A particular focus will be on the co-acquisition and co-emergence of meaning and syntax for solving particular tasks in the real world. Experiments and models are discussed with respect to proposed algorithms and representations, as well as advantages and disadvantages of current and past approaches.

Bio: Michael Spranger received his Diploma from the Humboldt- Universitt zu Berlin (Germany) in 2008 and a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels (Belgium) in 2011 (both in Computer Science). For his PhD he was a researcher at Sony CSL. He then worked in the R&D department of Sony corporation in Tokyo (Japan) for almost 2 years. He currently holds positions in Sony CSL and Sony Corporation. He is a roboticist by training with extensive experience in research on and construction of autonomous systems including research on robot perception, world modeling and behavior control. After his diploma he fell in love with the study of language and has since worked on different language domains from action language and posture verbs to time, tense, determination and spatial language. His work focusses on language learning, artificial language evolution and robotics.