[meetings] Call for Abstracts: Workshop on Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (SlaCE) at ECAL 2017

[Evert Haasdijk]

Dear Colleagues,

This is a call for abstracts for the Second International Workshop on
“Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (SlaCE)”, which will be held
at ECAL 2017 in Lyon, France.

Organizers:
Julien Hubert, j.g.hubert at vu.nl
Jacqueline Heinerman, j.v.heinerman at vu.nl
Evert Haasdijk, e.haasdijk at vu.nl
Chris Marriott, dr.chris.marriott at gmail.com
James Borg, j.borg at keele.ac.uk
Peter Andras, p.andras at keele.ac.uk

Submission deadline: June 27, 2017
Notification of acceptance: July 27, 2017
Submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slace2017
Workshop website: http://www.climbinggiants.com/slace/2/index.html
Contact e-mail: j.g.hubert at vu.nl

********* DESCRIPTION ********
In social species, learning from others, i.e. social learning, is one of the
cornerstones of cognitive development. Social learning has been shown
to increase the learning speed of individuals, but also enables them to reach
a higher performance in comparison with learning individually.
Social learning also enables local populations to develop a culture that can evolve
over time. Realising social learning in artificial systems faces many challenges
requiring inputs from machine learning, robotics and evolutionary biology.

The aim of this workshop is to promote discussions on social learning and
cultural evolution with a special emphasis on the future of of the field.
Social learning has been actively studied in psychology but is still in its infancy
in artificial systems. Many open questions remain, such as when is social learning
advantageous, or what kind of information should be transferred. These questions
have been studied but a consensus has yet to be reached, mainly because of
the difficulty to compare results in social learning due to the absence of a
common research framework. This workshop is devoted to discuss and establish
such a framework that will push the research forward.

The core of the workshop will consist of short presentations
from contributors on their work in the field (current or historical),
collective research goals and milestones in social learning and
cultural evolution or new concepts, modelling techniques or research
questions. Presenters are encouraged to address any of the following
topics (though this list is not exhaustive):
- Social Learning Mechanisms
- Social Information Transfer
- Transfer learning
- The interaction between social and non social learning
- The interaction between learning and evolution
- Environmental Variability, Environmental Complexity, and Social Learning
- Social Learning Strategies
- Social Learning and Life History Evolution
- Models of Learning in Nature
- The Evolution of Culture
- Communication
- Social Networks and Social Contagion on networks
- Group structure and learning bias
- Social Robotics
- Grounded (Animat) models of Social Learning
- Do our definitions match those used in other related fields (i.e
Imitation, Culture, ...)
- Human Cultural Evolution (Cumulative Culture)
- Co-operation
- Gene-Culture Co-Evolution/ Dual Inheritance Theory
- Philosophy of Culture
- Memetics

The workshop will conclude with a fishbowl discussion on the future of Social
Learning and Cultural Evolution research in ALife.

We ask potential contributors to submit an extended abstract (1 page).
We are open to presenters who are contributing during
the main ECAL conference to also talk about their work during the
workshop in order to have additional discussions. PhD students and
young career academics who are new to the field are encouraged to
submit to this workshop.

SLACE-2017 will be held on September 4th 2017, at ECAL 2017

Kind Regards,
Julien, James, Jacqueline, Evert, Chris and Peter