1. Hello everyone, welcome to NCRA 7th workshop 2016.

Im Nam Le, PhD

student at NCRA from August 2016. Today Im going to talk about my
research topic, namely: Social Genetic Programming: The idea from
social learning. It is the first main research theme in my PhD studies
2. I earned both my bachelor and my master in Vietnam.
3. When first came to this direction, my first glance is that Social Learning is
huge with a lot of abstract and confusing definitions. Actually, I
misunderstood that this project is about combination of genetic
programming with PSO, but its not. PSO is just a simple form of learning
in social context. Then I met social learning theory by Bandura, and pay
attention on that theory. So today I will talk shortly about some definitions
and issues in STL. And then I present my first attempt using STL with
Genetic Programming in form of grammatical evolution, as well as some
further improvement I plan to do in near future.
4. What is STL? First discussed by Alberta Bandura, an American
Psychologist in 1974. He believed that social element can result in the
development of new learning among individuals, and People can learn
new things and develop new behaviors by observing other people. Social
learning theory integrated behavioral and cognitive theories of learning in
order to provide a comprehensive model that could account for the wide
range of learning experiences that occur in the real world. Involve
observation, extraction of information from those observations, then
making decisions. Reinforcement plays a role in learning but is not entirely
responsible for learning. So we know that the main focus in STL by
bandura is observational learning. Lets move on next slide.
5. The observational learning starts with an attention process. In a social
group, members with interesting qualities are likely to receive more
attention than the others. At the same time, informative function
determines which characteristics of the models capture attention and which
will be ignored .Then, people remember the details of their exemplary
behavior with a retention process and practice to reproduce the behavior
with a reproduction process. However, even if the attention- retention-
reproduction process is finished, the person will not engage in the behavior
without motivation. In the motivation process, the learnt behavior, which
 previously remained unexpressed, will take action when incentives are
provided .
6. - Attention: Observers cannot learn unless they pay attention to what's
happening around them. This process is influenced by characteristics of
the model, such as how much one likes or identifies with the model, and
by characteristics of the observer, such as the observer's expectations or
level of emotional arousal. - Retention/Memory: Observers must not only
recognize the observed behavior but also remember it at some later time.
This process depends on the observer's ability to code or structure the
information in an easily remembered form or to mentally or physically
rehearse the model's actions.- Imitation/Reproduction: Observers must
be physically and/intellectually capable of producing the act. In many
cases the observer possesses the necessary responses. But sometimes,
reproducing the model's actions may involve skills the observer has not yet
acquired. It is one thing to carefully watch a circus juggler, but it is quite
another to go home and repeat those acts. - Motivation: Coaches also give
pep talks, recognizing the importance of motivational processes to
learning.
7. Reinforcement plays an important role in observational learning for it
distinguishes learning from simply imitating the others. In social learning
theory, behavior is regulated by external reinforcement, vicarious
reinforcement, and self- reinforcement, among which vicarious
reinforcement has a crucial role [1]. Vicarious reinforcement is defined as
the adaptation in the behavior of observers when they notice the response
consequences of the models. Generally, it includes vicarious positive
reinforcement (that observers display an increase in the behavior when
they see models get positive consequences), and vicarious punishment
(that negative consequences prevent observers from behaving similarly
like the models). By the effect of vicarious reinforcement, observers may
perform even better than the models. Moreover, observational learning is
the primary source of innovation in a social group owing to the following
reason. Observers will neither concentrate on a single model, nor absorb
all characteristics of the preferred model, but they abstract common
features of diverse models to form a behavior rule or combine different
attributes of the models to develop distinct personalities. The more diverse
the models are, the more likely the observers exhibit creative, innovative
behavioral patterns.