Socially assistive robots have the potential to improve the quality of life of older adults by
encouraging and guiding their performance of rehabilitation exercises while offering …

The paper concerns some extremal problems on packing spheres in graphs and covering
graphs by spheres. Tight bounds are provided for these problems on general graphs. The …

This paper addresses word learning for human–robot interaction. The focus is on making a
robotic agent aware of its surroundings, by having it learn the names of the objects it can …

Emphasizing that word-forms are culturally selected, the paper takes a distributed view of
language. This is used to frame evidence that, in ontogenesis, language emerges under …

Could androids use movements to build relationships? For people, relationships are created
with the help of behaviour-shaping norms, which infants begin to discover and manipulate …

Finding the body in uninterpreted sensory data is one of the fundamental competences to
construct the body representation that influences on adaptabilities of the robot to the …

After reviewing the papers in this special issue, I must conclude that brains are not syntactic
engines, but control systems that orient to biological, interindividual, and cultural norms. By …

Language provides humans with the ability to convey information using a set of shared
symbols, called words. The intriguing question of how the relation between words and …

We study the question of how a local learning algorithm, executed by multiple distributed
agents, can lead to a global system of communication. First, the notion of a perfect …

I present the symbol grounding problem in the larger context of a materialist theory of
content and then present two problems for causal, teleo-functional accounts of content. This …