John K. Tsotsos – författare

A key property of neural processing in higher mammals is the ability to focus resources by selectively directing attention to relevant perceptions, thoughts or actions. Research into attention has grown rapidly over the past two decades, as new techniques have become available to study higher brain function in humans, non-human primates, and other mammals. Neurobiology of Attention is the first encyclopedic volume to summarize the latest developments in attention research.An authoritative collection of over 100 chapters organized into thematic sections provides both broad coverage and access to focused, up-to-date research findings. This book presents a state-of-the-art multidisciplinary perspective on psychological, physiological and computational approaches to understanding the neurobiology of attention. Ideal for students, as a reference handbook or for rapid browsing, the book has a wide appeal to anybody interested in attention research.* Contains numerous quick-reference articles covering the breadth of investigation into the subject of attention* Provides extensive introductory commentary to orient and guide the reader* Includes the most recent research results in this field of study

What is the human mind, and how does it work? These questions have occupied humanity since antiquity but have only recently received rigorous scientific investigation. Cognitive architectures are complex software programs whose goal is to approach human-like behavior on a wide variety of tasks. This is accomplished by employing human-like, or at least human-plausible, mechanisms within an integrated framework that is claimed representative of human cognitive, perceptual, and movement capabilities. By examining how close their behavior is to human, they help us understand how the human mind and brain work. They contribute to our understanding as computational models that can be tested and whose details in turn provide insights on new aspects of the human brain and mind. This field of cognitive architectures emerged at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science and in less than fifty years has spawned hundreds of projects.In The Computational Evolution of Cognitive Architectures, the authors trace the evolution of cognitive architectures, their abilities, and future prospects, from their early logic-based beginnings to their recent melding of classic methodologies with deep learning concepts. Analyzing over 3000 publications on more than eighty cognitive architectures and hundreds more surveys, research papers, and opinion pieces spanning philosophy, cognitive science, computer science, and robotics, the authors aggregate their findings into broad themes, such as common components of the architectures, their organization, interaction, and relation to human cognitive abilities. They discuss both theoretical elements of cognitive architectures and their performance before finally considering the future of cognitive architectures and their challenges.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Attention and Performance in Computational Vision, WAPCV 2004, held in Prague, Czech Republic in May 2004.The 16 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on attention in object and scene recognition, architectures for sequential attention, biologically plausible models for attention, and applications of attentive vision.

In the past few years, with the advances in microelectronics and digital te- nology, cameras became a widespread media. This, along with the enduring increase in computing power boosted the development of computer vision s- tems. The International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS) covers the advances in this area. This is to say that ICVS is not and should not be yet another computer vision conference. The ?eld of computer vision is fully covered by many well-established and famous conferences and ICVS di?ers from these by covering the systems point of view. ICVS 2008 was the 6th International Conference dedicated to advanced research on computer vision systems. The conference, continuing a series of successful events in Las Palmas, Vancouver, Graz, New York and Bielefeld, in 2008 was held on Santorini. In all, 128 papers entered the review process and each was reviewed by three independent reviewers using the double-blind review method. Of these, 53 - pers were accepted (23 as oral and 30 as poster presentation). There were also two invited talks by P. Anandan and by Heinrich H. Bultho ¨ ?. The presented papers cover all aspects of computer vision systems, namely: cognitive vision, monitor and surveillance, computer vision architectures, calibration and reg- tration, object recognition and tracking, learning, human—machine interaction and cross-modal systems.

Attention has represented a core scienti?c topic in the design of AI-enabled systems in the last few decades. Today, in the ongoing debate, design, and c- putationalmodelingofarti?cialcognitivesystems,attentionhasgainedacentral position as a focus of research. For instance, attentional methods are considered in investigating the interfacing of sensory and cognitive information processing, for the organization of behaviors, and for the understanding of individual and social cognition in infant development. Whilevisualcognitionplaysacentralroleinhumanperception,?ndingsfrom neuroscience and experimental psychology have provided strong evidence about the perception–action nature of cognition. The embodied nature of senso- motor intelligence requires a continuous and focused interplay between the c- trolofmotoractivitiesandtheinterpretationoffeedbackfromperceptualmod- ities. Decision making about the selection of information from the incoming sensory stream – in tune with contextual processing on a current task and an agent’s global objectives – becomes a further challenging issue in attentional control. Attention must operate at interfaces between a bottom-up-driven world interpretationandtop-down-driveninformationselection,thusactingatthecore of arti?cial cognitive systems. These insights have already induced changes in AI-related disciplines, such as the design of behavior-based robot control and the computational modeling of animats. Today, the development of enabling technologiessuch as autonomous robotic systems,miniaturizedmobile–evenwearable–sensors,andambientintelligence systems involves the real-time analysis of enormous quantities of data. These data have to be processed in an intelligent way to provide “on time delivery” of the requiredrelevant information. Knowledge has to be applied about what needs to be attended to, and when, and what to do in a meaningful sequence, in correspondence with visual feedback.