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 Team Leader of the Laboratory for Behavior and Dynamic Cognition, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan in 2001. He became a Full Professor with the Electrical Engineering Department, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea in 2012. He is currently a Full Professor with the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa, Japan. He is also a visiting professor of 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.

Talk

Neurorobotics experiments on goal-directed planning based on active inference

The focus of my research has been to investigate how cognitive agents can develop structural representation and functions via iterative interaction with the world, exercising agency and learning from resultant perceptual experience. For this purpose, my team has investigated various models analogous to predictive coding and active inference frameworks using the free energy principle (FEP). In the current talk, I will introduce two recent studies. One is about online dynamic goal-directed action plan generation and its execution using a physical humanoid robot which was conducted under a supervised learning setting. The other is an extension of the aforementioned study by incorporating an exploratory reinforcement learning scheme using extrinsic rewards. I will discuss the future perspective of how these studies can be further extended by introducing intrinsic motivations such as curiosity under and beyond the FEP.