SETI Detection Strategies for Single Dish Radio Telescopes

Radio Searches for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence aim at detecting artificial transmissions from extra terrestrial communicative civilizations. The lack of prior knowledge concerning these potential transmissions increase the search parameter space. Ground-based single dish radio telescopes offer high sensitivity, but standard data products are limited to power spectral density estimates. To overcome important classical energy detector limitations, two detection strategies based on asynchronous ON and OFF astronomical target observations are proposed. Statistical models are described to enable threshold selection and detection performance assessment

Virtual Meeting Rooms: From Observation to Simulation

Much working time is spent in meetings and, as a consequence, meetings have become the subject of multidisciplinary research. Virtual Meeting Rooms (VMRs) are 3D virtual replicas of meeting rooms, where various modalities such as speech, gaze, distance, gestures and facial expressions can be controlled. This allows VMRs to be used to improve remote meeting participation, to visualize multimedia data and as an instrument for research into social interaction in meetings. This paper describes how these three uses can be realized in a VMR. We describe the process from observation through annotation to simulation and a model that describes the relations between the annotated features of verbal and non-verbal conversational behavior.\ud As an example of social perception research in the VMR, we describe an experiment to assess human observers’ accuracy for head orientation

Semiotic Dynamics Solves the Symbol Grounding Problem

Language requires the capacity to link symbols (words, sentences) through the intermediary of internal representations to the physical world, a process known as symbol grounding. One of the biggest debates in the cognitive sciences concerns the question how human brains are able to do this. Do we need a material explanation or a system explanation? John Searle's well known Chinese Room thought experiment, which continues to generate a vast polemic literature of arguments and counter-arguments, has argued that autonomously establishing internal representations of the world (called 'intentionality' in philosophical parlance) is based on special properties of human neural tissue and that consequently an artificial system, such as an autonomous physical robot, can never achieve this. Here we study the Grounded Naming Game as a particular example of symbolic interaction and investigate a dynamical system that autonomously builds up and uses the semiotic networks necessary for performance in the game. We demonstrate in real experiments with physical robots that such a dynamical system indeed leads to a successful emergent communication system and hence that symbol grounding and intentionality can be explained in terms of a particular kind of system dynamics. The human brain has obviously the right mechanisms to participate in this kind of dynamics but the same dynamics can also be embodied in other types of physical systems

Sharedness as an innate basis for communication in the infant

From a cognitive perspective, intentional communication may be viewed as an agent's activity overtly aimed at modifying a partner's mental states. According to standard Gricean definitions, this requires each party to be able to ascribe mental states to the other, i.e., to entertain a so-called theory of mind. According to the relevant experimental literature, however, such capability does not appear before the third or fourth birthday; it would follow that children under that age should not be viewed as communicating agents. In order to solve the resulting dilemma, we propose that certain specific components of an agent's cognitive architecture (namely, a peculiar version of sharedness and communicative intention), are necessary and sufficient to explain infant communication in a mentalist framework. We also argue that these components are innate in the human species