The human cognitive system is a remarkable exemplar of a general intelligent system whose competence is not confined to a specific problem domain. Evidently, the general cognitive competences of a human being are a product of a lifelong and complex process of cognitive development. Therefore, cognitive development is conceivably a primary key to understanding and realizing the emergence of AGI. While an already consolidated cognitive competence is applicable to a specific and identified problem domain, cognitive development is the very process of sense-making where there is no a priori knowledge about the problem domain and where cognitive competence is becoming.

The initial scheme of human cognitive development can be generalized by introducing the concept of continuous individuation – how heterogeneous populations of locally interacting agents may self-organize into scalable cognitive systems with an open-ended range of sense-making capabilities.

In the workshop we aim to present this approach to AGI and further explore how synthetic cognitive development can be understood as a process of self-organized sense-making taking place between alternating “distributed” and “integrated” phases of a population of agents. The discussion will span multiple disciplines including AI, cognitive science, philosophy and systems theory.

The workshop will consist of two keynotes, a small number of contributed talks, and a panel discussion.
Themes

Themes to be explored in the workshop will include:

* General intelligence as a process of cognitive development and the progressively determined structure of the cognitive system;
* Social construction of intelligence: individuation, boundary formation and information exchange across boundaries ;
* Integration and disintegration cycles in cognitive development.
* The balance between persistence and plasticity (of intelligent systems);
* The nature of (artificial) identity, agency and self;
* Scalable cognition;
* Situated and embodied versus distributed and unconstrained intelligent systems;
* Extended / embodied / enactive cognition in the light of social aspect of intelligence;
* Social aspects of (artificial) intelligence: social systems as (artificial) agencies and cognitive systems as social structures;
* the possibility of collective and localized intelligences;
* etc.

Keynotes

* Synthetic Cognitive Development – a path to AGI ?, Weaver (David Weinbaum), Global Brain Institute, VUB
* Additional keynote TBA

Call for Papers and Talks

Papers focused on any of the themes mentioned above, or closely related topics, are invited for (oral or poster) presentation at the Workshop, with a deadline of March 15.

Please submit papers via the same EasyChair process used for regular AGI-15 papers, but in the EasyChair system, select the “Workshop on Distributed Agency” option. This will cause your paper to be separately refereed by referees particular for the Workshop.

Papers accepted for the Workshop will be published in the main AGI-15 conference proceedings.

We are also open in principle for a small number of contributed Workshop talks that are not associated with proceedings papers. If you work in an area closely associated with the Workshop and are interested to give a talk at the workshop, but not submit a paper, then please email an abstract to ben@goertzel.org, together with a link to your web page or other source of biographical information about yourself.