2006 MSc Projects
Last updated: 24 February 2006
E-mail: J.J.Bryson // bath.ac.uk
General Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Natural
Intelligence, Artificial Life, AI Development Methodologies.
Samples of Specific Interests: Modular models
of animal
intelligence, the evolution of social behaviour, intelligent
environments,
tutoring systems, VR characters, autonomous robots, multi-agent models
of
political systems.
These are hacked from a number of sources, sorry the formatting
isn't uniform. For more about me, see my home page (above).
- A Review and
Repository for AI Gamebots Programs
- Several universities, including ours, are
using Unreal Tournament to test theories of artificial
intelligence. This project involves reviewing and documenting
these efforts. The final deliverable should be not only a
dissertation, but also a web page with links to the projects and
instructions for running the various bots. Ideally it should also
contain a preliminary table of competition for the bots in two
domains: Capture the Flag and the actual Death Tournaments.
You will also probably want to look at & review other similar
efforts, such as chess competition sites and RoboCup. You will
also need to get a number of the teams running. This project will
require a good deal of reading of both dissertations and papers and
also of other people's code, possibly in a variety of languages.
You will be expected to get at least three different sites agents up
and running against each other. Warning: do not expect this
to be easy; do not expect to get a lot of assistance!
See further:
- Improving the Usability of an Emotional Face
This project builds on an existing
system which uses a realistic emotional representation to control an 3D
VR face. It involves creating an editor for the expressions
associated
with different emotions, which includes an editor for altering the
"muscle" representation for the face. It requires programming in
C++
and working with a modular AI system (though you won't need to know
much / any AI.)
This is a good project for a student interested in an industry job in
applications or HCI.
You will be working with
Emmanuel
Tanguy, one of my PhD students, as well as myself, because it's his
system!
For some details about the system see also:
The Role of Emotions in Modular Intelligent Control, with
Emmanuel Tanguy, and
Phil Willis. Cover
article (well, blurb!) for the 2004 Summer
AISB Quarterly.
- Speech production & understanding for
an intelligent virtual agent.
This project builds on an existing
system which uses a realistic emotional representation to control an 3D
VR face. The main focus of the project will be improving the
sound of the speech as it comes from the face. What is said will
be handled either by a set script or an existing AI system. What
we want is to improve the existing Festival speech program -- taking
advantage of Festival's ability to create inflection on speech in order
to make the speech sound more appropriate to the emotion. If the
project goes well we may also try to link the system to a commercial
speech-recognition system.
This is a good project for a student interested in an industry job in
multi-media applications or HCI.
You will be working with
Emmanuel
Tanguy, one of my PhD students, as well as myself, because it's his
system!
For some details about the system see also:
The Role of Emotions in Modular
Intelligent Control, with
Emmanuel
Tanguy, and
Phil Willis.
Cover
article (well, blurb!) for the 2004 Summer
AISB Quarterly.
Here is the
Festival
Speech Production System.
Hopefully you will be using some existing work on Festival, see
http://www.pd.istc.cnr.it/FESTIVAL/home/emotions.htm.
- The
Behavior-Oriented Design of an Intelligent
Environment
- Behavior-Oriented Design (BOD) is an
iterative methodology for building artificial
intelligence. It is based on both object oriented design, dynamic
AI plans and somewhat like extreme programming. Intelligent
environments are rooms or houses that can sense and act, normally in
support of human users. This project would involve combining VR
avatars, language technology and vison or other sensing (touch screens,
pressure sensors) to create a prototype
system for helping support elderly users with failing memory. It
would helpful if the student knew a little about vision or
EE. The prototype may focus on something easier, like taking
typing breaks. This would probably be done mostly in python, but
you should not fear C. It will involve ordering complexity, good
time management, and being able to run extended experiments.
- Different Machine Learning Techniques for
Social Learning of Action Selection
I'm not entirely sure about this
project, but if you are good at mathematics and interested in machine
learning, come talk to me. The idea is that you will be getting a
stream of data from observing people & AI agents behaving in Unreal
Tournament, and you will be using different `off-the-shelf' pattern
matching techniques to compare different ways of recognizing what
perceptual contexts are leading to what behaviours. This work
will be done with my PhD student,
Mark Wood.
This is a good project for either doing research or industry, as there
are many opportunities to apply machine learning.
For other related work, see the
pyPOSH
page.
- Monkeys in a MUD (using BOD)
- Behavior-Oriented
Design
(BOD) is a way of making artificial
intelligence based on combining object oriented design and POSH
reactive plans. The goal of this project is to create entertaining
characters in a Multi-User Dungeon. We have a particular
dungeon in mind which we have already connected to with python
(it's this one). But you
should realize that that one has some fairly rude inhabitants who make
many jokes about sex and such things, so don't go there if you might be
offended. We chose it because:
- It is set up to be inhabited by AI characters as well as people.
- It has a regular population of people who actually use it, so
you will have people to test out your characters when they become good
enough to show off.
- The idea there was to build monkeys to run
around
the MUD, so there's no reason to tackle natural language (much.)
You would need to spend your first few weeks connecting pyPOSH to
the MUD. (Last year's student skipped this part & barely
passed. This year, if you skip it, you don't pass!) Then
you will need to create a monkey character who moves around and
interacts with people. It should ideally be unobtrusive most of
the time unless someone comes over and treats it well or badly.
- After you have one monkey, you should build
some more. The idea is that a troop of monkeys will be spread out
in the dungeon, mostly sitting quietly by themselves or grooming each
other if they happen to be in the same room. But if someone is
mean to a monkey (e.g. kicks it or hits it with a stick) it should go
find the rest of the troop then come back & find the mean character
and tease him as a group.
This is a good project for practising
programming skills for going into industry.
- This project requires representing building
representations of time & location. It is more difficult
conceptually than in terms of programming. For examples of
similar BOD agents, see these papers:
Building a Smarter Eliza
Description:
The Turing test is a functionalist solution to the
question "How will we know when we have achieved AI?" Alan Turing, (the
English mathematician who funded AI and computer science) suggested the
answer was simple: you've achieved it when people can't tell
whether they are interacting with a computer or a person.
There have been a number of systems built to try to achieve this
sort of AI, notably ELIZA, a Rogerian pschoanalyst that knows about a
few dialog patterns and also looks for certain keywords to focus in on
and come back to.
This project is about trying to extend ELIZA to be more flexible
--- to know about more different kinds of words that mean similar
things. The idea is to use search-engine like technology to
choose topics and possible also possible dialog structures.
You will need to learn about regular expresions and parsing, as well as
finding other resources available on the web. This is mostly a
programming project.
Pre-requisite knowledge:
This program will almost certainly be in lisp. If you want
to do it in another language, you will have to find the ELIZA and the
search engine code written in that language.
Indicative reading:
Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin's Speech and Language Processing: An
Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics,
and Speech Recognition, Prentice Hall, 2000
Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA: Communications of the ACM
Try also typing "M-x doctor" in any full version of emacs.
The
Behavior-Oriented Design of Modular
Agent Intelligence