April 2004 saw the birth of the first Newsletter of the Autonomous Mental Development (AMD) Technical Committee of the IEEE Neural Networks Society. Chaired by CSE's Juyang Weng, the newly created AMD Technical committee consists of leading researchers in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and other related fields.

Traditional approaches to machine intelligence require human designers to explicitly program task-specific representations of perception and behaviors, together with algorithms that interpret those representations to execute the tasks. In contrast, the AMD approach enables machines to autonomously develop (learn) perceptual, behavioral, reasoning and other skills through direct interactions with their physical environments, guided by a task-nonspecific "developmental program" that is designed by a human programmer who may not posses or fully understand such skills.

Congratulations to Juyang Weng, Yilu Zhang (Editor), and the AMD Technical Committee!