Research

My principle scientific passion is understanding human behaviour, human culture and natural intelligence more broadly. My main methodology for doing this is designing intelligent systems to model and test scientific theories. We build theories of intelligence into cognitive systems — working AI models. Modelling allows us to learn more about whether a theory is reasonable and what its implications are than we could using unassisted human reasoning. Once we understand a theory's implications and predictions, we can compare these to data empirical scientists collect from the real, natural system we are trying to explain.

Most of my career to date has focused on the unintentional and non-linguistic aspects of human intelligence. The more we understand both the universals and the variation we see across species in natural intelligence (also known as comparative cognition), the more we will understand the "hardware" human behaviour and human culture run on. From 2000-2007 this lead me to focus on understanding primate behaviour. More recently I have been working on understanding how consciousness, religion, economics (particularly costly punishment), language and other social behaviours have evolved in both humans and (where appropriate) other social species, including non-primates (even bacteria).

Designing AI models of natural intelligence also requires both good AI and good scientific method for utilising it. My research includes a great deal of work on systems AI, including my work in action selection and my development methodology, Behavior Oriented Design (BOD). We apply this work into a variety of domains besides science, including cognitive robotics, computer game characters and intelligent environments / "smart homes". In addition to working on how to develop AI and Cognitive Robotics, I also publish work on Robot and AI Ethics and their impact on society.

Understanding Natural Intelligence	Designing Intelligent Systems
The Artificial models of natural Intelligence Group
Past and Present Students

Other and Older Research Projects, Funding

I have been involved in promoting European Cognitive Systems research and education.

I occasionally get around to maintaining this research-oriented list of Related Web Sites .

All of my Code from published projects is available on line.

Research projects and labs previous to AmonI

The Reactive Accompanist – an AI music system that was one of the first applications of Behavior-Based AI outside of robotics. Edinburgh 1992
Cog - a humanoid robot that was intended to use BBAI to simulate the staged development of human infants. MIT 1993-1995.
I started really working on the interaction between planning and learning during a year with Ian Horswill using his cheap vision machine and LEGO robots. MIT 1995.
The Intelligent Systems Laboratory (now the Lab for Cognitive Neuroscience --- I worked on hierarchical action selection structures for robot control in a laboratory that was also actively exploring hierarchical representations in children and non-human primates. At that point, called my own architecture Edmund. I also tested it in Tyrrell's Artificial Life world. Edinburgh 1996-1997.
I was hired for the LEGO Darwin project to work with Kris Thórisson on a humanoid agent architecture for Virtual Reality characters. LEGO 1998.
I did a little research on reactive planning for dialog with the Tutorial Dialogue Group of the Edinburgh Human Communication Research Centre. Edinburgh, 1999
After developing BOD at MIT for my PhD, I worked with my former advisor Lynn Andrea Stein to apply it to DAML. Olin College & Stanford, 2001.
I also did a postdoc examining how modularity could explain the patterns of skill learning in primates. I did this in Marc Hauser's Primate Lab (now Cognitive Evolution Lab) at Harvard Psychology. When I started the postdoc I was hoping to switch permanently to psychology, but my experience in that lab convinced me I needed to spend more time in computer science in order to further develop software tools to the point they will be useful for people without programming experience. My more recent exeperience of being an alumnae of this lab has also helped motivate our current work on scientific infrastructure. Harvard 2001-2002.

Bath / AmonI Projects and Funding Acknowledgement

Please see the AmonI Web pages for descriptions of projects and links to code.

2010-2011: US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Project: Understanding Cultural Variation in Anti-Social Punishment. (two research officers, one programmer).
2008: European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems. Network action outreach grant. Project: Public Understanding of European Cognitive Systems. (two Outreach Officers).
2008: European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems. Network action outreach grant. Project: Higher Education Curriculum Support for European Cognitive Systems. (two Outreach Officers).
2007-2009, The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. Project: Factors Limiting the Evolution of Cultral Evolution (A three-year fellowship for me, of which two were taken with sabbatical support from Bath).
2006: European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems. Network action travel grant for Mr. Cyril Brom to visit Bath from Charles University, Prague. Project: Action Selection for Cognitive Systems.
2005-2008, The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Grant GR/S79299/01 (AIBACS), ``The Impact of Durative Variable state on the Design and Control of Action Selection''. Emmanuel Tanguy, co-author and named researcher. (One PhD student, one research assistant).
2005-2006 Anonymous industrial collaborator, ``Development of Graphical IDE for pyPOSH'' (contract for programming and six months support).
2005 The Nuffield Foundation Undergraduate Research Bursary, ``Understanding the Adaptive Advantage to Costly Communication''. Avri Bilovich, named researcher.

2005 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Conference funding for ``Modeling Natural Action Selection''. Workshop coorganized with Tony Prescott, Anil Seth.
2005–2006, British Council Alliance: Franco-British Partnership Programme , “Origins of Egalitarianism: Improving our understanding primate society through modelling two organizational norms for various species of Macaque”, with Bernard Thierry, Centre d’Ecologie et Physiologie Energe ́tiques.

Joanna Bryson

Last updated 28 December 2011