Autor: Xabier Barandiaran

Philosophy, autonomy, life, minds, machines, politics

Behavioral Metabolution: the very idea

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The paper I wrote together with Matthew Egbert and Ezequiel Di Paolo got accepted and will be soon published at the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Life. It is entitled Behavioral Metabolution: Metabolism Based Behavior Enables New Forms of Adaptation and Evolution and it addresses, the evolutionary scale interaction between metabolism and behavior, using a simulation of a bacteria-like moving protocell whose behavioral architecture is constituted by metabolism itself.

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Homeostatic Plasticity in Robots

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I am presenting this poster at the CogSys2010 Conference in Zurich. The poster shows some results of a simulation model I developed long ago (almost 5 years ago!) on a reinforcement learning task with evolutionary robotics, using homeostatic plasticity on the CTRNN controllers. I am currently writing a paper with Ezequiel Di Paolo on the details of the simulation model. The agents are capable to display a developmental process (connection weights are initialized at value 0), to solve an operant conditioning task and display the spontaneous formation of habits.

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COGS Talk: Defining Agency

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I gave a COGS Seminar Series talk here at Sussex. The title was «Defining Agency» where I presented the paper with the same title that I wrote together with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Marieke Rohde. I also included an example of the paper presented at ECAL2009 with Matthew Egbert. Thanks to Nicholas Hockins, there is a video of the talk available in Archive:

The video and the presentation slides can be downloaded from Archive or you can directly click on the picture above to download it (I am waiting for Archive to convert it into an online flash player).

Chemo-ethology of an adaptive protocell

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I joined Matthew Egbert and Ezequiel di Paolo on this paper exploring the emergence of viability boundaries on a simulated protocell and quantifying its behavioural adaptivity in relation to such boundaries. The paper addresses some key issues regarding the origins of norms and adaptive behaviour. It got published on the Tenth European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL09, Budapest, September 13-16, 2009, Springer Verlag.


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Animats in the Modelling Ecosystems (Response to Barbara Webb)

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The Journal of Adaptive Behavior has recently published a target article by Barbara Webb entitled «Animats vs. Animals». I was invited to write a critical response to her paper and joined Anthony Chemero to defend a variety of models in science, ranging from the most concrete to the most abstract.

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Defining Agency

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I have just recently submitted the last version for publication of a new paper, together with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Marieke Rohde: Defining Agency. Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry and Spatio-temporality in Action, to be published soon on a special issue on Agency edited by Mareke Rohde and Takashi Ikegami on Adaptive Behavior journal.

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Post-Doc at the University of Sussex

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I recently got a postdoc grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science to work at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, at the University of Sussex. Check out my Postdoc project: «Artificial Mental Life. A study of Brain­-Body­-World integration through neurocognitive robotics«.

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New Site

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Welcome to my new website. Hope you can enjoy it. My old websites at Sindominio and IAS-research is difficult to update at the Web 2.0 era and I really needed an academic site to freely post my recent publications and ideas. No need for the, ever changing, university based websites any more, having such a good tool as Free GPL WordPress.

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