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van de academische graad van doctor in de wetenschappen, in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 8 maart 2002. Acknowledgements I started as a research assistant in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in autumn 1996. My first interests were into behavioural robotics and robot ecosystems. As a continuation to my “licentiaats ” thesis I started building a camera system to extend the sensory perception of the lab’s robots (Belpaeme and Birk, 1997a,b; Belpaeme, 1998; Birk and Belpaeme, 1998; Birk et al., 1998, 1999; Belpaeme and Birk, 2001). It was around that time when Luc Steels got interested in the origins of language. His early experiments formed the seed for what is now one of the most important paradigms for exploring linguistic interactions with computer simulations. Luc soon wanted more and had plans to implement a language experiment in the real world, for which I delivered the visual perception (Belpaeme et al., 1998; Belpaeme, 1999). This got me interested in visual features, and my research

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 communication system is defined. Next, two measures of communication system quality are specified. It is shown that maximization of these measures leads to perfect communication production. Based on this principle, local adaptation rules for communication development are constructed. The resulting stochastic algorithm is validated in computational experiments. Empirical analysis indicates that a mild degree of stochasticity is instrumental in reaching states that correspond to accurate communication. 1.

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