We propose to organize a two-day workshop on Visual Navigation with invited speakers covering a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines with emphasis on visual navigation. The goal of the workshop would be to assess the state-of-the art in this field and to critically examine future trends. Through presentations and panel discussions, our goal would be to identify a number of new research questions surrounding Visual Navigation that have intellectual merit and whose answers have the potential for broad impact. New ideas have the potential to come from a number of new developments.
One such development is the discovery of mirror neurons. This opened new avenues because it means that the motor system of the agent is an important space that is directly related to perception. Visual navigation involves movement of the agent. When an agent A observes another agent B perform a task, then agent A "understands" what agent B is doing because he transfers the movement to his own motor system. In other words, agents possess representations of their own actions at an abstract level. Since this abstract level is related to language, it is possible to envision navigating systems of the future that provide language descriptions of their environment. Another important development is what is broadly known in some circles as "Hyper-empiricism". The availability of gargantuan amounts of data facilitates the "learning" of a number of functions related to navigation. Lots of interesting questions arise about what to learn and how, as existing computational learning techniques are inadequate. Other developments we hope will show up at the meeting.
