Interactive evolutionary design, a powerful technique where one marries the exploratory capabilities of evolutionary computation with the aesthetic skills and domain knowledge of the human as selective agent, has been demonstrated to be an extremely powerful exploratory design method. One of interactive evolutions most promising uses is in discovering individual-level rules of behavior and interaction that will produce a desired collective pattern in a group of human or non-human agents. The problem of finding micro-rules that produce interesting macro-behavior poses significant challenges, all the more so when what constitutes "interesting" macro-behavior may not be known ahead of time. Here, the system at our disposal is a real-time crowd polling and display system, whose potential for generating interesting group behavior remains largely untapped. Additionally, because the system is capable of polling large crowds of people in real time, it presents an ideal framework within which to take advantage of a relatively unexplored form of interactive evolution - collective evolution, where the opinions of the entire group are taken into account in the design of the next generation. Collective evolution has a broad range of potential applications, including marketing research and logo and brand name design.

We want to build robots capable of rich social interactions with humans, including natural communication and cooperation. This work explores how imitation as a social learning and teaching process may be applied to building socially intelligent robots, and summarizes our progress toward building a robot capable of learning how to imitate facial expressions from simple imitative games played with a human, using biologically inspired mechanisms. It is possible for the robot to bootstrap from this imitative ability to infer the affective reaction of the human with whom it interacts and then use this affective assessment to guide its subsequent behavior. Our approach is heavily influenced by the ways human infants learn to communicate with their caregivers and come to understand the actions and expressive behavior of others in intentional and motivational terms. Specifically, our approach is guided by the hypothesis that imitative interactions between infant and caregiver, starting with facial mimicry, are a significant stepping-stone to developing appropriate social behavior, to predicting others' actions, and ultimately to understanding people as social beings.

Summary form only given. Recent results from the ethological literature challenge some widely held views about the development of animal behavior and offer new directions for research into the organization of synthetic behavior systems. The process of development is often seen as one of continual refinement, with infantile behaviors representing the primitive precursors of adult behavior. While this notion is intuitively pleasing, there are two ways in which it may be incorrect. First, Coppinger (Coppinger and Smith 1990) argues that infantile behaviors are just as well adapted as adult behaviors, but adapted to the challenges that the organism faces during its early life and early social context. In his view, development is best understood as a process of, 'swapping' elements in the behavioral repertoire rather than refining them; the adult version of a behavior, in other words, is a distinct replacement for its juvenile counterpart, not an outgrowth of it. The second problem with the traditional view of behavioral development is that infantile behaviors are often expressed in an entirely different motivational context than their adult counterparts. Indeed, infantile behaviors that satisfy a particular motivational system such as hunger may be controlled by entirely different motivational systems. Hall and Willams have shown, for example, that during the first several weeks of life, a rat pup's suckling rate is independent of how hungry it is. That is, rat pups suckle because they are innately motivated to do so, not because they are hungry. Similarly, Hogan (Hogan 1999) suggests that during the first 48 hours of a chick's life, the amount that it pecks has nothing to do with its level of hunger. Leyhausen (Lorenz and Leyhausen 1973) has shown that the behaviors that make up the sequence of predatory behaviors in cats are refined through play, often well before the cat ever makes 'the connection' between the acquisition of prey and a subsequent reduction in hunger. What is going on here? In the first two cases, the juvenile behaviors act as 'fail-safe' mechanisms to ensure that the creature's needs are met without needing an innate or learned connection between the behaviors and the critical motivational systems that they act to satisfy. In the latter case, behaviors that will be critically important in adulthood are initially expressed and refined in a context in which the costs of failure are low, i.e. the creature's life doesn't depend on how well they perform the behavior at that given moment. Both of these concerns suggest that by re-examining our assumptions about development in animals, we may be able to glean generally useful organizing principles for the design of adaptive computational systems.