Curiosity and Motivation

Date: 27 August 2007
Technical Chair: Dr LEONG Mun Kew, Program Director (Services), Institute of Infocomm Research, A*STAR
Technical Advisor: Andrew Ortony, Professor of Psychology, Education and Computer Science, Northwestern University

Guest Speakers

John Cacioppo

Professor, Centre for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, USA

Ronald Rensink

Professor, Departments of Psychology and Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Canada

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris, France

Ian Horswill

Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, USA

Description

If you put a hole in the fence along a busy sidewalk downtown, nobody notices or cares. Put that same hole in the same fence next to a primary school and there'll be a line of kids trying to see what's on the other side. And if it's too dark to see, you can be sure numerous fingers will find their way into that same hole. The driving spark for those curious eyes and itchy fingers is curiosity. A child's curiosity is a wonder to behold; it's the motivation for them to explore; to learn; to try new things; to grow. And it's been said that to be a good researcher, one has to continue to share that childlike curiosity.

So curiosity is good. It motivates exploration. It helps an organism learn. By the behaviour of adults on a busy sidewalk vs. children in a playground, we know that as a phenomenon, curiosity exists. We know that over time and in different situations, the kind of behaviour we associate with curiosity changes in people. Physiologically, as we explore new environments, we know from brain studies that curiosity-motivated behaviour is linked to the reticular arousal system. So let's assume that curiosity is real; that it's an innate property of an organism and not just a surface phenomenon.

We're starting to build computer systems today which attempt to embody the concepts of curiosity and motivation. They "explore" new areas and can "learn" new theorems. But these behaviours are driven by heuristics and programming, not motivated by an innate sense of curiosity. Can we build a curious computer? Why would we want to do so? If we give a computer an innate sense of curiosity to motivate exploration, the ability to find out things and a memory to remember what it's learnt, then let it lose, what will it learn; what will it do? Is this the basis of a cognitive system? This workshop is intended to look at the fundamental nature of curiosity as well as to explore such questions of curiosity, motivation and exploration in computers.

The workshop will last two days and comprise a public lecture cum networking session by each of the four speakers, followed by a more intensive by-invitation-only meeting. In the public lectures (expected to be about 45 minutes each), we will explore two themes. The first is to understand the cognitive architecture, the physiological mechanisms, the developmental and evolutionary processes that is curiosity and motivation. The second is to consider how and why we might want to embody such properties in computer systems. In the follow-on meeting, we will focus on a more limited domain to try and scope some possible projects relating to the themes of curiosity, motivation and exploration. The participants as a group will be asked to write one or two brief white-papers outlining an anticipated approach and providing a relevant literature survey and scope of work breakdown.

Workshop Programme

27 August – Morning
Venue: Exploration Theatrette, Level 4, Matrix Building, Biopolis

Speaker Biographies

John Cacioppo

- Talk title: Curiosity: Evolutionary and Motivational Bases

John T. Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago and the Director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. He completed his PhD at Ohio State University and served on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame (1977- 1979), University of Iowa (1979-1989), Ohio State University (1989-1999), and University of Chicago (1999-present). Cacioppo has published 15 books and more than 350 articles, chapters, and reviews. His current research concerns the neuroscience of social connection. He is the President of the Association for Psychological Science and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Society of Experimental Psychologists, Association for Psychological Science, American Psychological Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and Academy of Behavioral Medicine. He has served as Editor of Psychophysiology and Associate Editor of the Psychological Review, Psychophysiology, and Perspectives on Psychological Science and is a recipient of the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award, Society for Psychophysiological Research Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychophysiology, and Donald Campbell Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Ronald Rensink

- Talk title: Extending Human Curiosity

Ronald Rensink is an Associate Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His research interests include human vision (particularly visual attention), computer vision, and interface systems that amplify human cognition. He has presented work at major conferences on basic vision science, computer graphics, and consciousness. He is currently part of the UBC Cognitive Systems Program, an interdisciplinary program that combines Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology.

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

- Talk title: Artificial Curiosity and Open-ended Cognitive Development in Robots

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer is researcher at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris where he co-founded and heads the Developmental Robotics group. He is also a member of the Origins of Language group at Sony CSL, and
teaches Social and Cognitive Robotics at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Techniques Avancées. He is interested in the mechanisms that allow humans and robots to develop perceptual, motivational, behavioral and social
capabilities to become capable of sharing cultural representations and of natural embodied interaction. In particular, he works on sensorimotor development and self-motivation, and his group built one of the first robots
endowed with artificial curiosity. He also works on computational approaches to language origins and evolution. He was co-chair of the Epigenetic Robotics international conference, and is associate editor of Frontiers in Neurorobotics. He has published a book, more than 50 papers in international journals and conferences, and holds 8 patents on technologies such as emotional speech synthesis and recognition, active learning, and human interaction with autonomous robots. He received several prizes for his research on the origins of speech and developmental systems, including the prize “Le Monde de la recherche universitaire”.

Ian Horswill

- Talk title: Curiosity and Autonomy

Ian Horswill is associate professor of computer science at Northwestern University. His research interests include autonomous robots and technologies for interactive virtual characters. He is director of the Animate Arts Program, a joint project of the Northwestern’s Schools of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Communication, Music, and Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he is director of the Division of Graphics and Interactive Media, and of the Department of Radio/Television/Film. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993.