Previous Academic Professional Activities

Fellowships and Visiting Positions:

• January 2011 - present: Visiting researcher at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung.
• January-December 2010: Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Oxford. Working on the Explaining Religion Project.
• August 2007 - August 2009: Hans Przibram Resident Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research, Vienna, Austrial. I studied the biological evolution of cultural evolution.  This work was 1/3rd supported by a sabbatical from the University of Bath.
• September2007-June2009: Visiting research fellow, Methods and Data Institute of the University of Nottingham.

Journals:

Committees:

• Executive Committee for the European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems (2007-2008).
  
• External Advisory Committee member for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Human Complex Systems Program (since 2008).
  

Funding Agencies:

• Member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) College.
• Additional reviews for: 
  
• USA's National Science Foundation (NSF) and Air Force Office of Research (USAFOR); The United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and The Leverhulme Trust; and the European Commission.
  

Workshops or Conferences

Previous  Memberships

• Member of the Agent Link Agent Based Social  Simulation (ABSS) SIG (2003 meeting).
• The EPSRC Biologically Inspired Robotics Network (biro-net)
• The Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour in the Edinburgh Division of Informatics (I was also in the Edinburgh Mobile Robot Group from 1996-1999).

Former or Near Affiliates or Collaborators

• I've written one paper and two grant bids with Bruce Edmonds of  Manchester Metropolitan University's Centre for Policy Modelling.
• I spent the Summer of 2001 as a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Olin College working on DAML with Lynn Andrea Stein. Within DAML, I mostly worked on DAML-S, with the kind help (and hosting) of Sheila McIlraith, David Martin and Jerry Hobbs.
•  Jessica Flack of Emory University and the Santa Fe Institute helped me get started modeling primate social behavior.
• I was associated the MIT Leg Lab for about 8 years, though I never really worked on any of their projects. 
  
• Similarly, I spent a (very) little time with the MIT Clinical Decision Making Group and the MIT Intelligent Room. 
  
• I attended meetings of the agent group at Harvard under Barbara Grosz, MIT's BCS (Brain and Cog Sci), and Harvard's LDS (Lab for Developmental Studies.)
  

More History

My MIT PhD officially took 4 years. 1.5 years from January 2000 to June 2001, and 2.5 years from September 1993 through December 1995.  I came in to MIT with an MSc from the Edinburgh Department of AI.  In 1996 and 1997 I did robotics and cognitive modelling research in the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience and Intelligent Systems in the Department of Psychology of The University of Edinburgh, under Brendan McGonigle. I submitted an MPhil dissertation in Psychology on this work in 1999, which I defended successfully on January 7, 2000. An MPhil is a 2-year British graduate research degree (in contrast to their 1-year MSc or 3-year PhD.)

I spent most of 1998 working on humanoid agent architectures for a virtual reality project for LEGO, Denmark, with Kris Thórisson.  In 1999 I worked with Mark Steedman (well, not much really) and more with Johanna Moore. Originally I was helping them transition to Edinburgh, but soon I became a member of the Human Communication Research Centre Tutorial Dialogue Group, where I started working on using reactive planning for dialog.  I finally returned to MIT to finish my PhD when my partner got a postdoc with Dan Dennett.