This book includes papers from the second year of the prestigious First International Early Research Career Enhancement School (FIERCES) series: a successful, new format that puts a school in direct connection with a conference and a social program, all dedicated to young scientists. Reflecting the friendly, social atmosphere of excitement and opportunity, the papers represent a good mixture of cutting-edge research focused on advances towards the most inspiring challenges of our time and first ambitious attempts at major challenges by as yet unknown, talented young scientists. In this second year of FIERCES, the BICA Challenge (to replicate all the essential aspects of the human mind in the digital environment) meets the Cybersecurity Challenge (to protect all the essential assets of the human mind in the digital environment), which is equally important in our age. As a result, the book fosters lively discussions on today's hot topics in science and technology, and stimulates the emergence of new cross-disciplinary, cross-generation and cross-cultural collaboration. FIERCES 2017, or the First International Early Research Career Enhancement School on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures and Cybersecurity, was held on August 1-5 at the Baltschug Kempinski in Moscow, Russia.

This book presents cutting-edge research focused on current challenges towards the realization of Biologically Inspired intelligent agents, or Cognitive Architectures (BICA). The chapters are written by both world-recognized experts (including Antonio Chella, Olivier Georgeon, Oliver Kutz, Antonio Lieto, David Vernon, Paul Verschure, and others) and young researchers. Together, they constitute a good mixture of new findings with tutorial-based reviews and position papers, all presented at the First International Early Research Career Enhancement School on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (FIERCES on BICA 2016), held April 21-24 in Moscow, Russia. Most works included here cross boundaries between disciplines: from neuroscience to social science, from cognitive science to robotics, and from bioengineering to artificial intelligence. A special emphasis is given to novel solutions to urgent problems that have been resisting traditional approaches for decades. Intended for providing readers with an update on biologically inspired approaches towards the computational replication of all the essential aspects of the human mind (the BICA Challenge), this book is expected to foster lively discussions on the topic and stimulate cross-disciplinary, cross-generation and cross-cultural collaboration.

The book focuses on original approaches intended to support the development of biologically inspired cognitive architectures. It bridges together different disciplines, including artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuro- and social sciences, psychology and philosophy of mind, among others. The chapters are based on contributions presented at the 12th Annual Meeting of the BICA Society (BICA 2021), which consisted of two parallel virtual events: Information in Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures based Systems, held during the 2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information, on September 12-19, 2021, from Vienna, Austria, and the 2021 International Workshop on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, held during the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, on September 14-17, 2021, from the Fukuchiyama City, Kyoto, Japan. The book discusses emerging methods, theories and ideas towards the realization of general-purpose humanlike artificial intelligence or fostering a better understanding of the ways the human mind works. It provides engineers, mathematicians, psychologists, computer scientists and other experts with a timely snapshot of recent research and a source of inspiration for future developments in the broadly intended areas of artificial intelligence and biological inspiration.

This book describes new theories and applications of artificial neural networks, with a special focus on answering questions in neuroscience, biology and biophysics and cognitive research. It covers a wide range of methods and technologies, including deep neural networks, large scale neural models, brain computer interface, signal processing methods, as well as models of perception, studies on emotion recognition, self-organization and many more. The book includes both selected and invited papers presented at the XXIII International Conference on Neuroinformatics, held on October 18-22, 2021, Moscow, Russia.