Publications of Joanna J. Bryson

Please note I no longer put all my drafts on line, just ones I particularly want to hear comments on (hint, hint).   My very early papers are in postscript, the later ones are in pdf, some middle ones are in both.  If you have trouble viewing any papers, try these helpful instructions.  

this year

Cultural Ratcheting Results Primarily from Semantic Compression. To be presented at and appear in The Proceedings of Evolution of Language 2010. Disputes a claim that cultural accumulation can't happen without communicating intentions, and talks about the consequences of and some extensions of the simulation work I did with Cace, on what limits the size of culture.

Why Robot Nannies Probably Won't Do Much Psychological Damage. A commentary on an article by Sharkey and Sharkey, The Crying Shame of Robot Childcare Companions, to appear in Interaction Studies.

An expanded version of Modelling Natural Action Selection (Seth, Prescott & Bryson eds.) will be coming out as a book on Cambridge University Press. I think this is the last version since we've now run through all the primary permutations for the order of the editors. Previous versions were a PTRS-B special issue (2007) and a workshop proceedings (2005).

Robots Should Be Slaves. To appear in a book on Artificial Companions published by John Benjamins, edited by Yorick Wilks.  The book is derived from the meeting Artificial Companions in Society: Perspectives on the Present and Future, at the Oxford Internet Institute, 26 October 2007.  The chapter says companion is the wrong metaphor for robots, which leads to the misallocation of both resources and responsibility to the detriment of our society.  Draft from 21 May 2009.

Simplifying the Design of Human-Like Behaviour:  Emotions as Durative Dynamic State for Action Selection, with Emmanuel A. R. Tanguy,  in The International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 1(1):30-50 January 2010.  Penultimate draft, from May 2009. Related software and articles.

References in HTML	References in Bibtex

2009

Building Persons is a Choice an invited commentary on an article by Anne Foerst called Robots and Theology, in Erwägen Wissen Ethik 20(2):195-197 (2009). It isn't that AI couldn't conceivably deserve ethical obligation, rather it would be unethical for us to allow it to. See further my page on ethics and AI.

Age-Related Inhibition and Learning Effects: Evidence from Transitive Performance, in the proceedings of Cognitive Science 2009.  The paper is a scientific consequence of the ideas put forward in "Crude, Cheesy, Second-Rate Consciousnes" (see below), and the work I am doing on understanding the evolution of cognition.  It concerns the tradeoffs between individual and genetic learning, and whether these may be shifted on the basis of individual experience over an agent's life history.  Evidence is derived from models of macaque task learning.  Camera ready from April 2009.   Associated software comes with the standard lisp distribution of BOD.

Crude, Cheesy, Second-Rate Consciousness. Presented at the 2nd AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy in April.  Final draft from March 2009.  An earlier, shorter version discussing Dennett more directly is listed under 2008.  The scientific ideas (without mention of robots or consciousness) are supported in my CogSci09 paper, above.

Representations Underlying Social Learning and Cultural Evolution.  In Interaction Studies, 10(1):77-100.  The version linked from the title is the penultimate draft from December 2008.

References in HTML	References in Bibtex

2008

Embodiment vs. Memetics, in Mind & Society 7(1):77-94 May.  Discusses the importance of the discovery that human-like semantics can be learned simply from observing large corpora, with ramifications for the evolution of language.  The final version is from November 2007, here is a penultimate draft from August for those who do not subscribe, although it has a couple gaffs in it.

The Impact of Durative State on Action Selection, appeared in Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior at the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposia at Stanford in March.  This is a somewhat pedantic overview of the improvements we've made to BOD, POSH and of course AI action selection in general in the last three years, with an eye to pleasing the EPSRC since my grant with the same title just ran out.  Final version from January 2008. 

References in HTML	References in Bibtex

2007

• Plenary: AI Architectures (or State Requirements for Human-like Action Selection), plenary presented to the euCognition meeting on Cognitive Architectures, 29 June 2007. Mine was the first, overview talk -- I focus on characteristics of AI architectures that worked, and mention a few that didn't work but got famous anyway.
• Plenary: Cognition (& Robots), a shorter though related talk (second of the day this time) that focusses more on cognition, from Humans and Humanoids -- Perspectives in Cognition and Robotics, a research symposium at Bielefeld in honour of their new Cognitive Robotics lab.  9 October 2007.
• Solicited talk: Hierarchical organization of Intelligence: Ethology and AI Perspectives, from the NIPS workshop Hierarchical Organization of Behavior: Computational, Psychological and Neural Perspectives. 8 December 2007.
  

DRAFT:  Hagen Lehman and I, Modelling Primate Social Order:  Ultimate and Proximate Explanations.  A peek at the new model we're building of the egalitarian / despotic variation in primate social order.  (Lest you think we only criticise other people's!)  DRAFT from April 2007.

Agent-based models as scientific methodology: A case study analysing primate social behaviour, with ANDO Yasushi and Hagen LEHMANN.  In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - B, Biology 362(1485):1685-1698.  This paper talks about how ABM fits in as a part of scientific methodology, and in particular analyzes as a case study the macaque social structure simulation in Hemelrijk's DomWorld.  The DomWorld link includes the associated software.  An earlier version of this paper with the predictions and not the full analysis appears under 2005 below (Lehmann et al).

Two special issues I edited last year have come out this year:  Tony J. Prescott,  Joanna J. Bryson and Anil K. Seth (eds), Modelling Natural Action Selection in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B -- Biology 362(1485), September 2007. Camera ready from April 2007. Joanna J. Bryson (ed), Mechanisms of Action Selection, in Adaptive Behavior 15(1), March 2007.  Camera ready from December 2006. Also, one came out that Ivana Cace really did all the work on: Ivana Cace and Joanna J. Bryson (eds) Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development, in the Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 5(2), October 2007.

• Tony J. Prescott,  Joanna J. Bryson and Anil K. Seth, Introduction. Modelling Natural Action Selection in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B -- Biology.  This is actually quite a substantial article which covers the concept of action selection far more thoroughly than any other article in the two issues.  I strongly recommend reading it.  Written in April 2006.
• Mechanisms of Action Selection: Introduction to the Special Issue.  Adaptive Behavior 15(1):5-8.  That is actually just four pages, two of which introduce the articles.  The first two pages though are an essay on the problem of action selection --- it's history & current status as a research problem. Written in December 2006.
  

• Mark Wood and I, Representations for Action Selection Learning from Real-Time Observation of Task Experts.  This paper expands on the COIL system (presented first and more completely in the IEEE journal article) for imitation learning, showing how adding solid Bayesian representations improves both performance and extendibility. Zip file of associated software.
• Emmanuel A. R. Tanguy,  Phil J. Willis and I, Emotions as Durative Dynamic State for Action Selection.  The 6-page version of the AI part of Emmanuel's PhD on the Dynamic Emotion Representation, which may more generally be useful for selection problems that fall between long-term potentiation (learning) and nerve-cell firing (acting).  Associated software.
  

2006

2005

Hagen Lehman and I, Tolerance and Sexual Attraction in Despotic Societies: A Replication and Analysis of Hemelrijk (2002).  In the proceedings of  Modeling Natural Action Selection. Final, 18 June 2005.  Extended in 2006 (printed in 2007), see above.

Edited Conference Proceedings:  Joanna J. Bryson, Tony J. Prescott and Anil K. Seth, Modelling Natural Action Selection: Proceedings of an International Workshop. Published by AISB, Sussex UK. For more information, see the MNAS Home Page. (July 2005)

Samuel J. Partington and I, The Behavior Oriented Design of an Unreal Tournament Character. A case study of using BOD, presents a very complicated POSH plan.  In the proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents 2005.  Final version is copyright Springer.  Updated 23 June 2005.

Paula M. Ellis and I, The Significance of Textures for Affective Interfaces. Shows that what picture is on a VR face has very significant impact on how the emotions are perceived.  In the proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents 2005. Final version is copyright Springer.  Updated 23 June 2005.

Learning Discretely: Behaviour and Organisation in Social Learning, with Mark Wood.  Talks about memetics, task learning, neuroscience and VR games --- what more could you ask? Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts.  Updated 16 January 2005.

Ivana Cace and I, Why Information Can Be Free. Shows that the tendency to communicate information can be adaptive even though it has immediate costs to the communicators and there are free riders / information hoarders around the place. Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication (EELC'05).  Updated 16 January 2005.  Extended in 2006, see above.

2004

Evidence of Modularity from Primate Errors during Task Learning, in the proceedings of the Ninth Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW '04). Relates my transitive inference work to the localist vs. modularist neural representation debate that used to be a big deal at NCPW. Final: 29 Dec 2004.

Modularity and Specialized Learning: Reexamining Behavior-Based Artificial Intelligence, in the Proceedings of The Third International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL'04): Developing Social Brains. A slightly longer & less informative version was presented at Adaptive Behavior in Anticipatory Learning Systems (ABiALS'02), but missed being in the proceedings due to an error on my part.  Final version:  20 September 2004.

2003

Emmanuel Tanguy, Phil Willis and I, A Layered Dynamic Emotion Representation for the Creation of Complex Facial Expressions. In the proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents.  Final version from July 2003.

The Behavior-Oriented Design of Modular Agent Intelligence (pdf). A practical guide to Behavior-Oriented Design (BOD). In the Proceedings of Agent Technology and Software Engineering (AgeS 02), edited by Jörg P. Müller. The final version is © Springer. Updated 27 November 2002

Bryson, David Martin, Sheila I. McIlraith, Lynn Andrea Stein, Agent-Based Composite Services in DAML-S: The Behavior-Oriented Design of an Intelligent Semantic Web, in Web Intelligence, Springer 2003. Ning Zhong, Jiming Liu, and Yiyu Yao, eds. This is a longer, more detailed version of our IEEE Computer (2002) paper.  Here's a nice review of the book from IEEE Distributed Systems.

Where Should Complexity Go? Cooperation in Complex Agents with Minimal Communication (in pdf). Discusses when to use communication between agents in a multi-agent system vs. when to use behavior arbitration between modules in a modular single agent. Shows code from the primate colony simulation I'm working on with Jessica Flack. Final version is © Springer-Verlag. In the proceedings of the First GSFC/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC). Updated 3 July 2002.

2002

Language Isn't Quite That Special (HTML). Commentary on The cognitive functions of language by  Peter Carruthers, both in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS). Updated 10 Dec, 2002. BBS called the issue this got printed in `Dec 2002' but it must have come out in 2003! Well, I try to keep this page in sync with the actual publication dates, maybe that's crazy...

Action Selection for an Artificial Life Model of Social Behavior in Non-Human Primates with Jessica Flack. Three-page abstract presented at  Self-Organization and Evolution of Social Behaviour. Talks about exciting new research I hope to be spending more time on one day. Updated 6 June, 2002 (older, 8 page version from 30 March, 2001).

David Martin, Sheila I. McIlraith, Lynn Andrea Stein and I wrote two versions of the same paper. The shorter and somewhat cleaner one we called Semantic Web Services as Behavior-Oriented Agents. IEEE Computer rewrote this a bit into something called Toward Behavioral Intelligence in the Semantic Web for a special issue. More technical details are in a Springer chapter which can be found above under 2003. Both the book and the IEEE Computer special issue are about Web Intelligence, and edited by Ning Zhong, Jiming Liu, and Yiyu Yao. The papers recommend that the semantic web be viewed as containing intelligence, not just information. They also provide recommendations for altering the DAML-S spec. to better support this. Read about it in Russian. Updated 25 July, 12 October & 7th of July 2002, respectively.

Representing Cognitive Phenomena in Biological Systems. An invited 3-page rant (plus 1 page of references) about modularity and `cognition'. May be coming out in a book edited by Alex Meystel. Updated 22 May 2002.

What Monkeys See and Don't Do: Agent Models of Safe Learning in Primates (in pdf), with Marc D. Hauser. A position paper, describes the importance of constraints in learning in artificial and natural agents. In the proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Safe Learning Agents. Final revision, 21 January 2002.

2001

Intelligent Control Requires More Structure than the Theory of Event Coding Provides (HTML). Commentary on The Theory of Event Coding: A Framework for Perception and Action Planning by Bernhard Hommel, Jochen Müsseler, Gisa Aschersleben and Wolfgang Prinz, both appeared in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS). Updated Nov 13, 2001.

Embodiment vs. Memetics: Does Language Need a Physical Plant? from the Proceedings of the Workshop on Developmental Embodied Cognition (DECO 01). I describe my model of how language connects to modular embodied intelligence in nature, and what this implies for AI. Just a position/review paper, no novel results, but good fun. Updated October, 2001 Er... my revisions were made far too late to make the proceedings, but the original isn't very clear!  There is now an even more revised version, see 2007.

PhD Dissertation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Intelligence by Design in pdf (postscript version). Warning: that version is 344 pages long, due to 140 pages of lisp code. I have broken the dissertation into its main text, code appendices and bibliography, (all in postscript), in the likely event you just want to read the text. You can also email me to ask for a copy of the printed Tech Report, which is paperback-like and doesn't have the code. The files above are from the TR, which is clearer than the submitted dissertation (pdf). I also have slides and video online from the defense, which was 30 April 2001.

Modularity and Design in Reactive Intelligence in pdf (postscript), with Lynn Andrea Stein. From IJCAI 2001. A 6 page summary of my dissertation, including a description of BOD, differences between reactive agent architectures, and an overly brief example of using BOD. (Final from April 10, 2001.)

HOW-TO: How to Make a Monkey Do Something Smart (13 pages of pdf) A brief document about Behavior Oriented Design (BOD). (Slightly modified April 18, 2001.)

2000

Dragons, Bats & Evil Knights: A Three-Layer Design Approach to Character Based Creative Play in pdf (compressed postscript). With Kris Thórisson. Final version appeared in Virtual Reality 5(2), a special issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents edited by Daniel Ballin. Article concerns the design of constructive narratives. Describes SoL (a hybrid architecture composed of Edmund and Ymir), a slightly modified form of BOD to support SoL, and our experiences developing AI for constructive narratives at LEGO. This version 18 December, 2000.

Modularity and Specialized Learning: Mapping Between Agent Architectures and Brain Organization in pdf (postscript version), with Lynn Andrea Stein. From the proceedings of EmerNet2000 (Emerging computational neural network architectures based on neuroscience). Final version is © Springer-Verlag. Discusses the relationship between agent architectures and neuroscience, and proposes a model for an agent capable of developing its own behavior / skill modules as well as learning new patterns of behavior. Target audience is neuroscientists and computer scientists interested in expanding neural networks to exploit modularity and specialized learning. Updated 3 December, 2000.

Modularity and Specialized Learning in the Organization of Behavior in pdf (or postscript). Written with Lynn Andrea Stein. Presented at NCPW6 in September, 2000, in the proceedings (the final version is © Springer-Verlag). Summary: This chapter is similar to the EMERNET one just above, but shorter (10 vs 15 pages) and focuses on my BOD systems rather than agent architectures in general. Targeted for psychologists and cognitive scientists who use neural networks to model human behavior. Updated 30 October, 2000.

Hypothesis Testing for Complex Agents in pdf (or postscript), with Will Lowe and Lynn Andrea Stein. In the proceedings of the NIST Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems held in August, 2000 (original website). Talks in detail about experimental method and the development of complex (even socially competent) agents. Updated July 2000.

Architectures and Idioms: Making Progress in Agent Design in pdf (or postscript). Written with Lynn Andrea Stein. Presented at ATAL 2000, now a book chapter, the final version is © Springer-Verlag. Summary: discusses the importance of methodology and the utility of alternative architectures - among other contributions, it distinguishes between these. Also gives a good one-page summary of what reactive planning really is. We suggest that the most useful thing to do with a new architecture is to identify its contributions and then express them in terms of one or more main-stream architectures. An extended example is made of an idiom we call a Basic Reactive Plan, taken from my architecture, Edmund, among other places. Updated 29 October, 2000.

Also at ATAL, Agent Development Tools with Keith Decker, Scott DeLoach, Michael Huhns and Michael Wooldridge. This is a synopsis of a panel discussion, with a fine two-page rant from me I still stand by. There's a free version on Scott DeLoach's publications page.

Hierarchy and Sequence vs. Full Parallelism in Reactive Action Selection Architectures (that's postscript), in The Sixth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2000) (Note: there's a pdf version with an extra blank page.) Summary: demonstrates that hierarchy does not necessarily lead to a reduction of performance, even in highly dynamic environments. An illustration (with statistical evaluation) of the importance of clean design approaches to creating good AI systems. A shorter, less clear version of this paper appeared in Intelligent Virtual Agents 2, 1999. Final version; published in August 2000.

I presented two papers at two different symposia for AISB 2000. In Aaron Sloman's How to Design a Functioning Mind (DAM) I have Making Modularity Work: Combining Memory Systems and Intelligent Processes in a Dialog Agent (postscript version). First published description of BOD, uses dialog systems for the examples. (Final from March 2000.)

A Proposal for the Humanoid Agent-builders League (HAL) (or postscript) also appeared in the proceedings of John Barnden's symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and (Quasi-)Human Rights. See further my AI and Society web page. (Final from March 2000.)

Cross-Paradigm Analysis of Autonomous Agent Architecture in pdf (or compressed postscript) in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI) 12(2). Summary: article about trends in agent architectures and what they imply about optimal strategies for designing intelligence.

MPhil Dissertation: University of Edinburgh, Faculty of Social Sciences (Department of Psychology) The Study of Sequential and Hierarchical Organisation of Behaviour via Artificial Mechanisms of Action Selection. That is the 173-page 11-point 1.5-spaced PDF version, with a little source code my examiners asked for. There's also a 94-page 10-point single-spaced compressed postscript version with no source code. Complete source code is available at the bottom of this page. Summary: gives evidence for the need for structured control from three sources: the history of AI agent architectures, my experiments in two domains (robotics and artificial life), and a review of the neurological / behavioral literature. Also discusses the dialect differences between Psychology and AI, and AI as a research tool for Psychology. (Final corrections, January 2000).

1999-1997

Creativity by Design: A Character Based Approach to Creating Creative Play , in the AISB Symposium on AI and Creativity in Entertainment in April, 1999 Summary: another proto-BOD paper, talks about combining Edmund with another agent architecture, Ymir, in the context of virtual reality characters. More about SoL, Ymir and the project is in the "Dragons, Bats & Evil Knights" paper above; some of the technical details of implementing Edmund's POSH architecture in SoL are in "Architectures and Idioms" paper also above.

TALK: Intelligence by Design was presented to the Generator Studios artists group in Dundee Scotland, as part of the It's In Your Head art and neuroscience initiative in August, 1999.

Agent Architecture as Object Oriented Design, presented in Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages 1997, and published in Intelligent Agents IV by Springer in 1998. Summary: a proto-BOD paper, this describes developing behaviors and control scripts in a way similar to developing object hierarchies in OOD. Also mentions the way I have localized learning in the behavior libraries.

Just Another Artifact: Ethics and the Empirical Experience of AI. Coauthored with my friend Phil Kime, presented at the Fifteenth International Congress on Cybernetics, 1998. See also my AI and Society page.

Cognition without Representational Rediscription coauthored with Will Lowe. This is a commentary on Dana H. Ballard, Mary M. Hayhoe, Polly K. Pook, and Rajesh P. N. Rao, Deictic Codes for the Embodiment of Cognition; both articles appeared in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS) in late 1997.

DRAFT: (from 1997): Specialized Learning and the Design of Intelligent Agents Old PhD proposal cum journal article under revision on the potential equivalence and trade-offs between control state and learning -- it's pretty rough in places but apparently also interesting (according to the reviewers.) This has been extended into two chapters of my PhD dissertation, the ones about learning. Maybe this year I'll resubmit it...

1996-1992

The Design of Learning for an Artifact from the AISB96 workshop on Learning in Robots and Animals. (There's also an older, longer version about Cog.) Learning in animals seems to be highly specialized and constrained as much as possible, primarily to things that cannot be learned in evolutionary time scales. As a developers of behavior-based AI, we largely take on the role of evolutionary learning ourselves. Our robots or avatars should only have the special-purpose sorts of learning built-in to their everyday actions.

DRAFT: (from 1996): Modular Adaptivity and Behavior Based Control A short paper which discusses the role of episodic memory in navigation. I got some of this working on my robot, see my MPhil thesis, but some of it still needs to get worked out and written up...

DRAFT: (from 1995) The Use of State in Intelligent Control . This short paper compares Shakey and Genghis, and demonstrates the necessity of using control state even in the simplest reactive system. I'm not sure anyone cares enough for me to ever get this one published! But I still think it could be useful for some people. (The original Genghis didn't actually back up and turn when it bumped into something with a feeler. It just lifted its leg higher. Ooops. Oh well, the same arguments still all apply. The behavior I described was on the commercial version of Genghis available then from ISR (now iRobot.)

In Luc Steels (ed.) The Biology and Technology of Intelligent Autonomous Agents, (1994) The Reactive Accompanist: Adaptation and Behavior Decomposition in a Music System Describes my MSc project, is also the first place I suggest adaptive requirements can serve as a key to determining how to decompose intelligence into modularized behaviors (key point in BOD).

The Reactive Accompanist: Applying Subsumption Architecture to Software Design Edinburgh University Department of AI tech report 606 (1992) This paper is temporarily (January 2003) inaccessible due to the Edinburgh fire.   Since `temporary' has lasted for over two years, here's a draft version I still had the latex for.  Compares Subsumption Architecture with Object-Oriented Design in the context of my MSc.  Draft was last modified around November of 1992, it was placed here March 2005.

MSc Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Faculty of Science (Department of Artificial Intelligence) The Subsumption Strategy Development of a Music Modelling System. For more information, see my page on the Reactive Accompanist. (September 1992)