Troy, N.Y. — The Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host the 2006 North American Computing and Philosophy (NA-CAP) conference Aug. 10 – 12, 2006. The three-day symposium will feature lectures and demonstrations from leading researchers in the fields of cognitive science, philosophy, artificial intelligence (AI), computer science, information technology, and engineering.

The conference aims to promote scholarly dialogue on all aspects of the computational turn (the way information and communication technology are actively influencing philosophy), and the use of computers in the service of philosophy, according to Selmer Bringsjord, chair of Rensselaer’s cognitive science department and host of the event.

Bringsjord performs research in cognitive robotics, gaming, and AI, and has built artificial intelligence systems that are capable of literary creativity. Most notably, he developed Brutus.1, a computer that can write short stories of up to 500 words based on the notions of betrayal, deception, and evil. Bringsjord is currently engineering “E,” an advanced synthetic character that is genuinely evil.

Beginning at 10:20 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 11, Bringsjord will moderate a special session on Robot Ethics, which will address recent questions raised in the AI and robotics fields regarding the imminent arrival of robots that are so autonomous and powerful that they are capable of harming humans. The session is open to members of the media, and will be held in the auditorium of Rensselaer’s Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies.

“The North American Computing and Philosophy conference allows thinkers from a wide range of interconnected disciplines a venue in which to investigate the philosophical aspects of computing, information technology, and robotics,” says Bringsjord. “Thought-provoking presentations from William Rapaport, Eric Dietrich, Meredith Finkelstein and Cindy Jeffers, and Peter Ludlow, among others, will touch on timely topics in robot ethics, AI, robotics, computational logic, and linguistics.”

Recently named one of the “10 most influential video gamers of all time” by MTV.com, Peter Ludlow is recognized by many as the pseudo-journalist who was kicked out of the virtual gaming community “The Sims Online” after starting an online newspaper called The Alphaville Herald. The paper reported on the often inappropriate behavior of the cyber-citizens in the online world, calling to light the game publisher’s inability to monitor and maintain control over the virtual environment. When his citizenship from The Sims Online was revoked in January 2004, Ludlow landed on the front page of The New York Times. 

The University of Michigan philosophy and linguistics professor has since moved to another online world, “Second Life,” where he runs the newspaper The Second Life Herald, writing under the name Urizenus Sklar.

Meredith Finkelstein and Cindy Jeffers are the founding members of Botmatrix, an art robotics collective dedicated to raising appreciation for robots’ design, abilities, and beauty. Together they created five remote-controlled robots that could move and speak, as well as emit lights, smoke, and ticker tape. The androids performed alongside real actors in the play Heddatron, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsens’s Hedda Gabler.

Rapaport, who will give the keynote address, is associate director of the Semantic Network Processing System (SNePS) Research Group at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, where he teaches computer science and philosophy. The SNePS research group is dedicated to understanding the nature of intelligent cognitive processes by developing and experimenting with computational cognitive agents that are able to use and understand natural language, reason, act, and solve problems in a wide variety of domains. SNePS is being used in many sites around the world for studies in expert systems, knowledge representation, and reasoning, among others.

A professor of philosophy at Binghamton University and editor of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Dietrich elaborates on and defends “computationalism” – the view that the brain is some sort of massively parallel machine, and the mind a virtual machine emerging from this parallel machine – in his published works.

NA-CAP 2006 is sponsored by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy, a professional organization that exists to promote scholarly dialogue on issues at the intersection of computing and philosophy. Each conference is independently organized by a program chair working with a conference committee.

For a complete schedule of the 2006 NA-CAP conference, visit: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/conferences/cap/schedule.php.

Contact: Amber Cleveland
Phone: (518) 276-2146
E-mail: clevea@rpi.edu