Connection Science has just completed its 25th year of publication, a remarkable milestone and a tribute to the vision of its founding editor Noel Sharkey, and to its past and current editorial boards. I am delighted to have been handed the helm of this remarkable vessel and hope that I can steer the journal successfully as it begins its second quarter-centenary.
These are exciting times for research on the computational understanding of the mind.
First, there is a resurgence in the connectionist approach, which inspired the founding of this journal, through the recent discovery of deep learning methods (Bengio, Citation2009; Hinton, Osindero,& The, Citation2006). The importance of these new learning methods, which are heavily brain-inspired and allow the training of networks with many more layers than was previously feasible, is demonstrated by their rapid adoption in speech recognition technologies for mobile phones, and by the rush with which leading companies such as Facebook and Microsoft are now moving to establish deep learning research groups. As they impact on real-world technologies these methods are also breaking new ground in theories of brain function (Hinton, Citation2007). Second, there is the real prospect of a convergence between cognitive neuroscience, systems computational neuroscience, connectionism and dynamic systems theory, which could provide significant advances in the understanding of brain architecture, and that could result in new models that capture the functionality of the mind at the behavioural level at the same time as matching many of the important neurobiological constraints (Eliasmith et al., Citation2012; Wyss, König, & Verschure, Citation2006). There are many exciting developments in these areas but one organising principle that promises to help bridge between these different domains of expertise is the idea of the brain as a prediction engine engaged with the task of trying to comprehend its sensory inputs by anticipating them (Bastoset al., Citation2012; Clark, Citation2013). Finally, the potential to build and test embodied systems, such as robots, enables models to be tested fully against the rigours of the real world, and allows us to investigate the role of the body, environment and society in structuring behaviour (Prescott, Montes Gonzalez, Gurney, Humphries, & Redgrave, Citation2006; Chiel, Ting, Ekeberg, & Hartmann, Citation2009; Pfeiffer & Bongard, Citation2007; Prescott, Lepora, Mura, & Verschure, Citation2012).
To reflect this landscape and the opportunities it presents, I have proposed the following revised aims and scope for Connection Science:
Connection Science is an inter-disciplinary journal dedicated to exploring the convergence of the analytic and synthetic sciences of mind including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, computational modelling, artificial intelligence, analog and parallel computing, and robotics.
A strong focus is on the simulation of living systems and their societies, including humans, and on the development of novel forms of synthetic life such as biomimetic robots. Articles arising from connectionist, probabilistic, dynamical, or evolutionary approaches, and that explore distributed adaptive computation or emergent order, are particularly relevant. The journal also encourages submission of research in systems-level computational neuroscience that seeks to understand sensorimotor integration, perception, cognition, or awareness in brain-like model systems.
The revised journal aims are couched in the distinction between synthetic (engineering) and analytic (reverse-engineering) approaches in the cognitive and brain sciences, a contrast that I trace to Valentino Braitenberg's ambition to develop a new ‘Synthetic Psychology’ (Braitenberg,Citation1984) and to Howard Gardner's notion of the ‘Mind's New Science’ as a multi-disciplinary enterprise embracing science, engineering and the humanities (Gardner, Citation1985). It is my ambition that Connection Science should become known for promoting research that takes the best of the synthetic and analytic approaches and shows how their combination can enable us to unlock more of the secrets of natural intelligence.
To strengthen the profile of the journal further, Connection Science is being published in association with ‘The Convergent Science Network for Biomimetics and Neurotechnology’ (CSN: http://csnetwork.eu) in 2014 and beyond.
CSN is a European Union-sponsored international network that is concerned with many of the same research themes as our journal. In particular, CSN is dedicated to understanding the principles through which natural systems, including animals and their nervous systems, are able to cope with the challenges of the real world, and to translating these principles into useful technologies. CSN will help to promote the journal through the international scientific events it organises which include the conference ‘Living Machines: Research in Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems’, the Barcelona Summer School on Brain, Cognition and Technology, the CapoCaccia Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop, and the Okinawa School of Computational Neuroscience.
With the change of Editor-in-Chief, and in the journal aims and scope, we have also decided to renew and revitalise the editorial board.
I am particularly grateful to Amanda Sharkey, who has assisted the founding editor, Noel Sharkey, in his editorial duties for much of the past quarter century and particularly in the last ten years as the acting editor. Thanks to both, I am inheriting a journal that is well regarded by the community and that has a pipeline of quality manuscripts already in place for the first half of 2014. In recent years, Noel and Amanda have become particularly well known for their research on societal impacts of robot technologies, and they will continue to have a role in the journal, as founding editor and associate editor, respectively, in helping to develop the new theme on philosophical and social issues. I would also like to thank the editorial board members who are stepping down this year, some of whom have been with the journal since its outset. I am delighted too that many members of the editorial board are staying on to support Connection Science in this new phase, and to welcome new editors who have come on board. The revised board has depth, breadth, and strength, in all of the areas of research described in the new aims and scope, as a consequence I am confident that the journal will elicit and publish many high-quality and impactful research articles going forward.
Finally, I am grateful to Taylor and Francis for their support in this transitional period, and for the enthusiasm they share with me for opening Connection Science to new areas and audiences. As part of that support, the journal will be visiting a number of international conferences in the next 12 months and we look forward to meeting many of our readers and contributors at these events. Please look out for us at meetings or contact us directly if you would like to discuss a possible manuscript submission. The journal is also open to receiving proposals for special issues in thematic areas relevant to the new aims and scope. We very much look forward to receiving your ideas and feedback, and hope you will travel along with us as Connection Science sets out on its next twenty-five years!
References
- Bastos, A. M., Usrey, W. M., Adams, R. A., Mangun, G. R., Fries, P., & Friston, K. J. (2012). Canonical microcircuits for predictive coding. Neuron, 76(4), 695–711. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.10.038
- Bengio, Y. (2009). Learning deep architectures for AI. Foundation and Trends in Machine Learning, 2(1), 1–127. doi: 10.1561/2200000006
- Braitenberg, V. (1984). Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Chiel, H. J., Ting, L. H., Ekeberg, O., & Hartmann, M. J. (2009). The brain in its body: Motor control and sensing in a biomechanical context. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(41), 12807–12814. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3338-09.2009
- Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science, 36(3), 181–204.
- Eliasmith, C., Stewart, T. C., Choo, X., Bekolay, T., DeWolf, T., Tang, Y., and Rasmussen, D. (2012). A large-scale model of the functioning brain. Science, 338(6111), 1202–1205. doi: 10.1126/science.1225266
- Gardner, H. (1985). The mind's new science: A history of the cognitive revolution. New York: Basic Books.
- Hinton, G. E. (2007). Learning multiple layers of representation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(10), 428–434. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.09.004
- Hinton, G. E., Osindero, S., & The, Y-W. (2006). A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets. Neural Computation, 18(7), 1527–1554. doi: 10.1162/neco.2006.18.7.1527
- Pfeiffer, R., and Bongard, J. (2007). How the body shapes the way we think: A new view of intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Prescott, T. J., Montes Gonzalez, F. M., Gurney, K., Humphries, M. D., & Redgrave, P. (2006). A robot model of the basal ganglia: Behavior and intrinsic processing. Neural Networks, 19(1), 31–61. doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2005.06.049
- Prescott, T. T., Lepora, N. F., Mura, A., & Verschure, P. F. M. J. (2012). Biomimetic and biohybrid systems. 1st international conference on living machines, Barcelona, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (vol. 7375). Berlin: Springer.
- Wyss, R., König, P., & Verschure, P. F. M. J. (2006). A model of the ventral visual system based on temporal stability and local memory. PLoS Biology, 4(5), e120.
| Editors | ||
| Editor-in-Chief | = | |
| Tony J. Prescott, | = | University of Sheffield, UK |
| Founding Editor | = | |
| Noel E. Sharkey | = | University of Sheffield, UK |
| Associate Editors | = | |
| Angelo Cangelosi | = | University of Plymouth, UK |
| Andy Clark | = | University of Edinburgh, UK |
| Garrison W. Cottrell | = | University of California, San Diego, USA |
| Stefano Nolfi | = | ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy |
| Amanda J. C. Sharkey | = | University of Sheffield, UK |
| Stefan Wermter | = | University of Hamberg, Germany |
| Paul Verschure | = | University of Pompeu Fabra, Spain |
| Editorial Board | = | |
| Igor Aleksander | = | Imperial College London, UK |
| Minoru Asada | = | Osaka University, Japan |
| Christian Balkenius | = | Lund University, Sweden |
| Jim Bednar | = | University of Edinburgh, UK |
| Luc Berthouze | = | University of Sussex, UK |
| Mark Bishop | = | Goldsmiths, UK |
| Joanna Bryson | = | University of Bath, UK |
| Ke Chen | = | University of Manchester, UK |
| Paul Cisek | = | University of Montreal, Canada |
| Joachim Diederich | = | University of Melbourne, Australia |
| Peter Dominey | = | Inserm, Lyon, France |
| Georg Dorffner | = | University of Vienna, Austria |
| Michael Dyer | = | University of California, Los Angeles, USA |
| Michael J. Frank | = | Brown University, USA |
| Stevan Harnad | = | University of Southampton, UK |
| Philip Husbands | = | University of Sussex, UK |
| J. A. Scott Kelso | = | Florida Atlantic University, USA |
| Christoph von der Malsburg | = | University of Frankfurt, Germany |
| Jonatas Manzolli | = | Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil |
| Giorgio Metta | = | Instituto Italiano di Technologia, Genoa, Italy |
| Ben Mitchinson | = | University of Sheffield, UK |
| Tim Pearce | = | University of Leicester, UK |
| Giovanni Pezzulu | = | ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy |
| Andrew Phillipides | = | University of Sussex, UK |
| Kim Plunkett | = | University of Oxford, UK |
| Ronan Reilly | = | University College Dublin, Ireland |
| Anil K. Seth | = | University of Sussex, UK |
| Murray Shanahan | = | Imperial College London, UK |
| Narayanan Srinivasan | = | University of Allahabad, India |
| Luc Steels | = | Free University of Brussels, Belgium |
| Ron Sun | = | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, USA |
| Jun Tani | = | KAIST, South Korea |
| Carme Torras | = | Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain |
| Jeremy Wyatt | = | University of Birmingham, UK |
| Xin Yao | = | University of Birmingham, UK |
| Tom Ziemke | = | University of Skövde, Sweden |
| Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief | = | |
| Leila Prescott | = | Sheffield, UK |