Joanna J. Bryson

At Bath I do research in both Artificial and Natural Intelligence, with a particular emphasis on cognitive systems.  Some of my specific research areas are action selection, primate intelligence and the Robot and AI ethics.  See the Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence home pages for details of my research.  I also teach and supervise dissertation students.

Since 2011, I am also a visiting researcher at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung

News

• New book available, Modelling Natural Action Selection (Seth, Prescott & Bryson, eds.) on Cambridge University Press (November, 2011).
• Upcoming meeting on whether AI systems can or should be a moral patient, The Machine Question:  AI, Ethics & Moral Responsibility.
  
• This is one of three AI and Robot Ethics Symposia being run collaboratively at the meeting.
• Abstracts due 1 February 2012.
• Meeting will be at the joint AISB/IACAP Alan Turing 2012 Congress 2-6 July 2012.

CV & Biography

Here is my resumé (in PDF), as of December 2010.   My web pages (particularly my publications page) are often more up-to-date than my CV.

Here is a brief, popular-science biography of me, originally written for Cybersalon.  Here is a more recent biography I wrote myself for University of Vienna (2008).  See also my Bath Directory of Expertise entry and the rest of my web pages.

Current Professional Activities

• Journals:
  • An Associate Editor for Adaptive Behavior.
  • On the Editorial Board for The International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, and the Journal of Mind Theory.
    
  • For a full list of journals I've been involved in, see Previous Academic Professional Activities or my CV.
  • Additional reviews for:  
    • Evolution & Human Behavior; PLoS Computational Biology; Proceedings of the Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences; Journal of the Royal Society Interface; Neurocomputing; Behavior; Animal Behaviour; Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation; Biological Theory; IEEE Transactions on Robotics; IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation; IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics, B; Artificial General Intelligence.
      
• Organising Committee for Upcoming Symposium:
  
  • The Machine Question:  AI, Ethics & Moral Responsibility.
  • Abstracts due 1 February 2012.
  • Meeting at the joint AISB/IACAP Alan Turing 2012 Congress 2-6 July 2012.
• Programme Committee for Upcoming Workshops or Conferences:
  
  • Social Computing 2012
  • Cognitive Science 2012 (just reviews, not the committee)
  • See my previous professional activities for old conferences etc.
• Other Committees:
• External Advisory Committee member for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Human Complex Systems Program (since 2008).
• Elected Member of the College of the EPSRC (January 2006 - December 2009).
  
• Member of:
• The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB).
• The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB)
• The European Social Simulation Association (ESSA).
• Bath's  Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies, their Centre for Mathematical Biology, Neuroscience Network, and more informally (so far) their Biodiversity Lab.
• The ESF Network for the Evolution of Social Cognition.
  
• The UK Research Network on Artificial Intelligence and Video Game Technologies.
• The EC Convergent Science Network of Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems.
• Affiliate or Associate of:
  
  • Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS).
  • The Bath Institute of Complex Systems (BICS).
  • The Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour, The University of Edinburgh School (or something) of Informatics.

Collaborators

• My work on understanding the evolution of cognition and culture has led me to working on better understanding evolution, plasticity and variation in general. We're getting fantastic help from Nick Priest and Steve Dorus.
• In 2009-2010 I worked with Harvey Whitehouse and his group on explaining religion.
• My work on social behaviour began with efforts to model the intelligence of non-human primates. I'm collaborating most actively with from Julia Lehmann. Bernard Thierry and Carel van Schaik have also hosted me (and Thierry hosted one of my students) for research visits and given us papers and pointers. We've also been speaking with Robin Dunbar and Liesbeth Sterck and their colleagues.
  
• Cyril Brom and I share an interest in helping ordinary programmers build good AI. We both work on action selection and with computer games, though he has a larger group. We've coauthored a conference paper and a white paper, and we visit each other's universities quite frequently. Check out his group's Pogamut, which is quite an impressive games AI / teaching platform.
• For the 2001-2002 academic year I was a postdoc in Marc Hauser's Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, where I began working with Jonathan Leong and Mark Baxter.  For six of the years I've been at Bath, Mark Baxter was at Oxford in Experimental Psychology as a Wellcome Fellow, & we are still working on the cognitive neuroscience of primate task learning.
• I've done a lot of work with Kris Thórisson, originally after he'd hired me at LEGO. We've published together a bit, maybe we will again (see my publications.)  We still email & our students use each other's code.
• In 2004 Jim Edwardson, then director of the Newcastle Institute for Ageing and Health, recruited me to help advance his work on assisting helping people with dementia. He's since retired, but his interest in assistive environments brought me in contact with the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering.
• I sometimes work on semantics and natural language with my visiting research fellow,  Will Lowe. We may start working on modelling political systems soon.  We have been known to address all sorts of academic challenges  (photo credit: Hilary Till).
• See also my former research projects and previous collaborators.