- Bath Artificial Intelligence

Past Seminars:

2011 Seminar series

Bath Artificial Intelligence (BAI) Seminar is a research and discussion group. Announcements are made in the BAI mailing list, which also has its own archive.

If you are interested in speaking or inviting a speaker, please email Pablo Lucas.

Directions to Bath and a campus map: Computer Science is in 1W, beside the library.  Upcoming talks are listed below and announced by email.

Date, time Location Guest(s) Abstract
18/01/2011, 17:15  1 E 3.6 Dave Cliff AI, The Financial Markets, and the Flash Crash: WTF?

In 1996, I employed some fairly simple AI to develop one of the first ever adaptive autonomous trading agents suitable for real-time operation in the online versions of the global financial markets, an algorithm known as Zero-Intelligence Plus, or ZIP. In 2001, a team of researchers at IBM showed that ZIP could consistently out-perform human traders under experimental conditions. In the decade since then, I've worked with, and in, major financial institutions applying AI to the global markets. In the past five years, there has been an explosive growth in so-called High Frequency Trading (HFT), where automated adaptive systems trade at super-human speeds. On May 6th 2010, in a period lasting roughly 30 minutes, an unprecedented sequence of chaotic events took place in the New York markets: an event now widely referred to as "The Flash Crash". The role of HFT in the Flash Crash has been the topic of some debate. In this BAI Seminar, I will summarise these events, and place them in the wider context of major socio-technical systems failures in the deployment of risky technology, and will argue for the use of agent-based modelling and computational intelligence techniques in helping to identify the likelihood of similar events in future.
08/02/2011, 17:15 1W 2.7 Tony Belpaeme
 Artificial cognition through interaction

The holy grail of artificial intelligence is the creation of human-like machine intelligence. While AI has made progress in leaps and bounds and is nowadays ubiquitous through its application in information filtering on the web and handheld devices, we still are far from attaining human-like intelligence. The reason for is a disregard in artificial intelligence for what it is that makes us intelligent and how our cognition develops as we grow up. Central to this all is social interaction, where cognition is shaped through interacting with intelligent others. One of the most important elements of social interaction is language: we are the only species having language and the link between language and our cognitive prowess should be explored, not only in humans but also in artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The talk will show a number of cognitive robotics experiments, using humanoid robots, that study social interaction and language supporting concept formation.
15/03/2011, 17:15 1 E 2.4 Gordon Ingram TBA
19/04/2011, 17:15 1 E 2.4 Bruce Edmonds TBA
10/05/2011, 17:15 1E 3.6 Peter Andras TBA