Older Research
This is a subset of our recent AmonI research projects, biased towards
things we are interested in continuing working on if we find the right
people and / or funding. More former projects are available from
the list of
Joanna
Bryson's former students, Joanna Bryson's former research,
Alwyn
Barry's research page and
Daniel
Richardson's home page. For more information on the below projects,
see the
author's publications pages. The sofware associated with many of
these projects is available on
the AmonI software page.
- In addition to our current
research on Behavior
Oriented Design (BOD), we maintain a BOD
version of the agent-based modelling tool, MASON, as well
as the jython/python version of BOD's action selection, jyPOSH.
We
have used BOD/MASON both for modelling, and for training, though more
could be done with this. Jan
Drugowitsch did a lot of this work, as did
Tristan Caulfield
and Andy Kwong.
- The sort of planning we use for real-time AI (POSH dynamic plans)
has also given us insight into what's wrong with a different kind of
planning, project planning. We have been working to develop tools
& process around this. Meri
Williams
made a good start on this, and John Baillie Strong made a very good
verison. This still needs to be productised and perhaps released
with a management book.
- Emmanuel
Tanguy built a system, EE-FAS, which
produces natural real-time models of emotions for facial
animation. This system is now being extended. For example,
Borui Zhang & Dr. Tanguy integrated EE-FAS with Elzware's chat bots; Jiang
Yifan worked on using the emotional state to alter the speech
production appropriately. Mary Estell
incorporated the avatar into an intelligent assistive environment.
- Joanna Bryson and Hagen
Lehmann were investigating how emotions
interact with the rest of action selection in primate social models,
then they
got Philipp
Rohlfshagen
to fix it. This is now a part of the standard jyPOSH
and BOD/MASON
distribution.
- Paula
Ellis demonstrated that people's ability to recognize emotions on VR
characters depends heavily on the texture (picture) the character
wears. This work should be extended. Visiting student Maria
Shugrina and BAI member John Collomose made
an intelligent system, Empathic Painting
that adjusts art to the viewer's emotional state.
- One of the most interesting characteristics of intelligence is
its modularity. Joanna Bryson has since her PhD been working on
modular models of a standard benchmark task from experimental
psychology: Transitive `Inference'
Performance. Her published work was completed in collaboration
with Mark
Baxter and Jonathan
C. S. Leong. See also our current work on
task learning and our primate
learning web page.
- Mark Wood
modelled TI in ACT-R, which helped us better understand ACT-R and our
own model. John Mann
started this work final-year project. Emily Korvin worked
on extending the TI results to transverse patterning in her 2004
final-year project.
- Mark Wood for
his PhD developed a common framework for individual and social learning.
- Jan Drugowitsch
did a PhD with Alwyn Barry on formalizing our understanding of Learning Classifier Systems,
which combine genetic algorithms, reinforcement learning and production
rule systems. Alwyn Barry also cosupervised Dr.
Jacob
Hurst's PhD at UWE on LCS in robot action
selection.
- Hagen Lehmann
completed a PhD on macaque
social behaviour. He and Joanna Bryson investigated
the evolutionary origins of primate social organization, with help from
Bernard Thierry.
- Ando Yasushi
did an exceptionally good MSc project on the impact of predation on
primate social
organization.
- Rob Jenks
similarly did an award-winning undergraduate dissertation on emergent
chimpanzee-like fission-fusion social organisation. Julia Lehmann
helped with this work.
- Alwyn Barry and Dan Richardson has supervised a number of
project students on flocking behaviour and group predation Alex
Hilton did an excellent undergraduate project on this. See
also the BOD
Sheep & Dog Demo.
- Mark Wood did a
PhD on the computational tractability of imitation and social learning
in task learning
for his PhD. Joanna Bryson has also done work on how culture and
modularity help with this tractability issue, inspired by Dan Sperber.
- Ivana Cace started our modelling of the evolutionary consequences
of the altruistic communication of behaviour, when doing her diploma
project for Utrecht with AmonI. Avri
Bilovich also helped fwith this research (funded by a Nuffield
Bursary), and Christos Bechlivanidis extended the results to the
evolution of prestige.
- Joanna Bryson did sabbatical research from 2007-2009 in Vienna
working on modelling the biological
evolution of cultural
evolution.
- Joanna Bryson has also looked at how memetics affects semantics
and language learning. With Will Lowe and Avri
Bilovich we have demonstrated these techniques can detect shifts
in
semantics over centuries, by comparing the Bible, Shakespeare and the
British National Corpus.
- Joanna Bryson's research on culture as a source of intelligence
has lead her to more general work in evolution and social behavoiur
including understanding the impacts of culture, modularity and
biological development on biological evolution and speciation.
- Alastair Fletcher
& Steve Dorus
working with Joanna Bryson started the work on epistasis (understanding
the
evolution of sex in terms of gene stability) that Marios Richards and
Nick Priest are working with us on now.
- Dr. Richardson and two of his PhD students, Andrew Carnell and Carl
O'Dwyer, are working on the dynamics of neural networks. This includes
looking at spike timings and Liquid State Machines (e.g CSim, due to
Maes). See Dan Richardson's
home page for other papers on the topic.
Not all of our applications are scientific.
- Human-like intelligence is useful in computer games too. Besides
being
fun, this is a good test-bed for
the usability of BOD & helps us debug and improve it. This
work was most recently done by Francis Binns and Andrew
Mansfield. Sam
Partington and Andy Kwong started this work at Bath, and Cyril Brom has a group of
people working on it at Charles University, Prague. The UT
capture-the-flag
character we built is too good for Joanna Bryson to play against
anymore.
- Mark Wood also applied and demonstrated his PhD research on
integrating individual and social learning using a single AI in UT.
- Joanna Bryson has helped advise the Bath University Submarine
Racing
Team (BURST) for their annual competition effort, especially their
autonomous robot team.
- Joanna Bryson, Dylan Evans
and
Veronica Sundstedt
put togher a website to help promote and popularise cognitive systems like
domestic
robots, autonomous rescue robots and assistive environments.
- Joanna Bryson originally became interested in intelligent
environment through Michael Coen
and Krzyzstof Gajos.
She was brought into the medical end of it originally by Jim
Edwardson of Newcastle University's Institute of Aging and
Health on this
problem. Two of her project students, Mary Estell and Andrew
Beggs have built prototype systems for this utilising BOD, the DER and
Tanguy's
facial avatar EE-FAS.