eSMCs Summer School 2013 "Embodiment and Morphological Computation"

The school will take place from Sept. 23 - Sept. 27, 2013 at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

The school will give a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the art in the fields of embodied cognition, morphological computation and neuronal mechanisms of enactive cognition. In addition it aims at connecting renowned researchers in the field with students and post-docs who are interested in the corresponding subjects.

The school will be the third in a series of summer schools funded and organized by the EU FP-7 project "Extending sensorimotor contingencies to cognition - eSMCs" (esmcs.eu). This year the school is jointly organized by the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich (www.ailab.ch) and the Dept. of Neurophysiology at the UKE Hamburg (uke.de/neurophysiology).

The five-day school will be structured around the following themes:

1. embodiment and morphology

2. active perception and sensorimotor contingencies

3. information theory

4. neuroscience of motor cognition

5. embodiment and awareness

The school will comprise keynote lectures in the mornings and workshops in the afternoons, which serve for in-depth discussions of topics from the keynote lectures. The workshops will feature hands-on tutorials where students have the opportunity to build their own robots using the robotic toolkit EmbedIT (embed-it.ch/) to study the impact of morphology on locomotion behavior.

Participation in the school will be free of charge, but participants will have to cover their own expenses.

Auke Iijspeert, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland.

Josh Bongard, University of Vermont, USA

Fumiya Iida, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Marek McGann, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland

Wolfgang Prinz, University of Münster, Germany

Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire, UK

Rajesh Rao, University of Washington, USA

Ricarda Schubotz, University of Münster, Germany

Angelo Maravita, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Catherine Tallon-Baudry, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

Herbert Peremans, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Rolf Pfeifer, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Helmut Hauser, University of Zurich, Switzerland

- Application deadline: 31.7.2013

- Notification of acceptance: 9.8.2013

- Summer school: 23.9.-27.9.2013

The school is open to 50 PhD students and post-docs who are working on the themes addressed. Interested participants shall submit written information on their scientific background, projects involved, and motivation to attend. Admission will be on a competitive basis.

Applications should be sent via email to esmcs-summerschool@ifi.uzh.ch. Please state on a single page (11pt font):

- Your scientific background and degree

- Your motivation to come to this school

- The topic of your thesis

- Any prior knowledge in the field

Participation in the school is free.

Previous schools in this series were "The future of the embodied mind", held 2011 in San Sebastián, Spain (summerschool2011.esmcs.eu/), and a conjunction with the "Barcelona cognition, brain and technology summer school" in 2012 (bcbt.upf.edu/bcbt11/).

For further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us
(esmcs-summerschool@ifi.uzh.ch).