ICONIP 2025

Biography: Jun Tani received the D.Eng. degree from Sophia University, Tokyo in 1995. He started his research career with Sony Computer Science Lab. in 1993. He became a PI in RIKEN Brain Science Institute in 2001. He became a tenured Professor at KAIST, South Korea in 2012. He is currently a full Professor at OIST. He is also a visiting professor at the Technical University of Munich. His current research interests include cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, phenomenology, complex adaptive systems, and robotics. He is an author of “Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena.” published from Oxford Univ. Press in 2016.

Development of Higher Cognitive Mechanisms Through Iterative Sensorimotor Interactions With the World: Insights From Neurorobotics

This talk presents two recent neurorobotics studies that extend the active inference framework. The first study [1] explores how out-of-distribution generalization (ODG) can emerge during the learning of goal-directed object manipulation tasks. Robotic experiments demonstrated that a form of ODG can be achieved through the emergence of content-agnostic information processing at the executive control level during learning. The second study [2] builds on this by investigating how compositionality in action and language can be acquired through sparse interactive learning. Results showed that generalization of compositional structures improves when a wider variety of compositional elements are included in training examples. Finally, I will discuss how these findings provide insights into potential neural mechanisms underlying higher-order or meta-level cognition, as revealed through emergent phenomena in neurorobotics experiments.

[1] Queißer, J. F., Jung, M., Matsumoto, T., & Tani, J. “Emergence of Content-Agnostic Information Processing by a Robot Using Active Inference, Visual Attention, Working Memory, and Planning.” Neural Computation., 2021
[2] Vijayaraghavan, P., Queißer, J. F., Verduzco-Flores, S., & Tani, J. “Development of compositionality through interactive learning of language and action of robots.” Science Robotics, 10, eadp0751., 2025

Biography: Professor Yew-Soon Ong received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence for Complex Design from the University of Southampton, U.K., in 2003. He previously served as Chair of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Currently, he is a President’s Chair Professor in Computer Science at NTU and the Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore. His research interests encompass artificial intelligence, statistical machine learning, and optimization. He has played key leadership roles in major AI conferences, serving as General Co-Chair of the 2024 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence and has been an invited keynote speaker and panellist at numerous international AI-related conferences. Professor Ong is the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, senior associate editor or associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks & Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, he contributes as an Area Chair for several highly established AI conferences. He has received five IEEE Outstanding Paper Awards and was recognized as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher, and among the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2016. A fellow of the IEEE, he chairs the 2024 and 2025 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Fellow Evaluation Committee. He is also a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, Singapore.