<div dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">[* Apologies in case of multiple posting *]</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">The Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA), in collaboration with the AISB (Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, UK) is pleased to announce the next seminar of its Spotlight Seminars on AI initiative:</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">April, 29 – 5:00PM (CET)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Title: Consciousness and the Laws of Learning </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Speaker: MARCO GORI, University of Siena </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">The fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science began crossing their paths significantly during the Eighties when the Connectionist wave strongly pushed the studies on Artificial Neural Networks. The evolution of the last decades in AI with the focus on deep learning and, recently, on generative AI, has been producing spectacular results that were hardly predictable even by the fathers of the discipline. However, when looking at early studies on Connectionism, most dreams are still waiting to be realized, since most successful results rely on the brute force coming from joining computational resources and large data collections. This is far away from what we observe in Nature, where cognition emerges simply from environmental interactions while processing temporal information. In order to capture those natural processes and prospect an alternative path to Machine Learning, in this talk I give a preliminary view of cognitive systems whose environmental interactions are dictated by genetic features that are translated into the minimization of an objective functional over time. This functional, that is referred to as the cognitive action of the system, replaces the classic Machine Learning statistical functional risk. I use the apparatus of Theoretical Physics and Optimal Control to derive unified laws of cognition for learning and inference and show that Hamiltonian</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">equations in their causal dissipative form approximate the optimal solution over the entire data collection of the agent life. This comes from imposing the evolution on a Hamiltonian track which gives rise to a computational scheme for both focus of attention and conscious actions.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:12pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Bio: </span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline"> </span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Marco Gori is full professor of computer science at the University of Siena and 3IA chair at Université Côte d’Azur, Nice (MAASAI lab </span><a href="https://team.inria.fr/maasai/team-members/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(56,143,206);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">https://team.inria.fr/maasai/team-members/</span></a><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">).  His research interests are in the field of artificial intelligence, with emphasis on machine learning, vision, and game playing. In the last few years, he has been mainly involved in the unification of computational processes of reasoning and learning, driven by the principle that the the emergence of cognition is rooted in </span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">natural laws of computation</span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">.  He also very much like discussions on novel models of computation and their relationships with human brain.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline"></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">The joint AI*IA/AISB Committee of the Spotlight Seminars on AI, </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Giuseppe De Giacomo</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Floriana Grasso</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Antonio Lieto</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Bertie Muller</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Luciano Serafini</span></p><br class="gmail-Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font color="#000000"><span style="font-size:12.8px">-------------</span><br style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Antonio Lieto, Ph.D</font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font color="#000000"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Salerno, DISPC, Italy</font></font></div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Head of Cognition Interaction and Intelligent Technologies Lab (CIIT Lab) @ Unisa</span><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><a href="https://www.ciitlab.org" target="_blank">https://www.ciitlab.org</a>  </span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"> </span><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font color="#000000"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Research Associate at ICAR-CNR, Palermo, Italy<br></font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000">Home: <a href="https://www.antoniolieto.net/" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://www.antoniolieto.net</a></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font color="#000000">ACM Distinguished Speaker: <a href="https://speakers.acm.org/speakers/lieto_12489" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://speakers.acm.org/speakers/lieto_12489</a> <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><div><br></div><div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000">Deputy Editor in Chief of JETAI (Journal of Exp. & Theor. Artif. Intell., T&F)</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000"><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=teta20" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://www.tandfonline.com/jetai</a> </font></div></div></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000">Associate Editor of Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier)</font></div><div><font color="#000000"><a href="https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cognitive-systems-research/editorial-board" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cognitive-systems-research/editorial-board</a> </font></div></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font color="#000000"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><div><font color="#000000">Author of "Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds" (2021), Routledge, Taylor & Francis.</font></div><div><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138207950" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138207950</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>