It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 7th International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2008) in Monterey, California, USA. ICDL is a unique interdisciplinary conference, with latest research results that cover challenging gaps among computer science, robotics, psychology, and neuroscience to address the challenging subject of computational autonomous development, both natural and artificial.
ICDL 2008 accepted multiple submission formats, including a regular 6-page paper submission track, a short "late-breaking" 1-page abstract submission track, and proposals for special sessions. This was the first year that the "late-breaking" submission track was offered, and we received very positive feedback on providing the opportunity for many to present preliminary or very recent work and to take part in the ICDL meeting.
From the more than 120 different submissions, we selected 24 full papers for oral presentation, 27 full papers for poster presentation, 2 special sessions with a total of 8 presentations, and 21 late-breaking abstracts for poster presentation. The quality of the submissions was universally very high, providing a difficult (and often hotly debated!) choice for our program committee. Our review process enlisted the help of 38 program committee members who coordinated reviews from 127 reviewers.
We were also fortunate to have three outstanding invited speakers. Terry Jernigan will describe structural changes in the brain in response to experience. Richard Aslin will present theoretical and experimental investigations of distributional pattern learning in infants and adults. Andrew Ng will discuss unsupervised learning of structure via neuroscience inspired learning algorithms.
Our thanks to the ICDL General Chairs Jay McClelland and John Weng, Publications Chair Chad Jenkins, Publicity Chair Charlie Kemp, and ICDL Communications Co-Chair Jochen Triesch. We thank our financial sponsor, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and we thank the Cognitive Science Society for their endorsement.
We hope that you will enjoy this exciting program.
Brian Scassellati
Gedeon Deak
ICDL 2008 Program Chairs