The below is what is on my Moodle project page for
this year. Some of my older project pages have more links to
relevant research. Also, I may have updated some of these
projects. To check, look at Dr Bryson's
projects page. Students who work with me should be relatively
independent, although all my project students have a weekly group
supervisory meeting and often wind up helping each other a little as
well. I'm particularly interested in projects that go a little ways
beyond my own current knowledge, so you will really have to do some
research. On the other hand, the work you do may make a real
difference -- your code could easily wind up on line or you may have a
published paper. Undergraduates are a real part of my research
programme. See my previous
students page and the AmonI software
page. More information on my research can be found on my web
pages, especially my publications.
Dr Joanna Bryson
jjb _AT_ cs.bath.ac.uk
Dr. Bryson supervises two sorts of projects: AI projects,
primarily those to do with making the design of AI systems easier, and
NI projects, primarily those modelling the evolution of social and
cognitive behaviour. NI projects normally include a systems AI
component, since the tools we use for modelling natural intelligence
are all AI. Improving the AI or tools is one way to make the
computer science component of the project clear. Being your own
user is also the best way to make sure your tools are actually useful.
Similarly, for the AI projects, even if improving a tool is their main
thrust, you should still have a science or game development project to
conduct as well, since developers don't tend to really improve tools
they aren't actively using. See the
AmonI
software page
for details of some of our existing projects, and related papers on the
designing
intelligent systems page.
Dr. Bryson meets with all her students once a week in a group meeting,
so her students can also experience peer supervising and
supervision. There will of course also be a few longer individual
meetings at critical periods in both terms. She is not on campus
until late August, but can be contacted by email to negotiate
projects. She sometimes accepts novel project proposals from
strong students, and is happy to negotiate about and adjust her own
proposals to the interests and capabilities of a particular student.
Examples of possible NI projects this year include:
Modelling matriarchical dominance structures non-human contexts
Modelling the social structure of
lemurs
or
spotted
hyenas. This would be interesting in itself, but particularly
interesting if we could understand why these species have evolved to
have female dominant social structures.
Modelling fission / fusion social behaviour in non-human species
Modelling the fission/fusion society
and inter-troop relations of chimpanzees,
spider
monkeys or Mongolian Asses. Some work on this was done by Rob
Jenks in 2008/9, but it needs to be extended so that it can be
evaluated against animal data.
Modelling cultural variation
Modelling cultural variation in the use
of anti-social punishment. See "Antisocial Punishment Across Societies"
Science 319, 7 March 2008, 1362-1367 by Benedikt Herrmann,
Christian Thöni and Simon Gächter. [
abstract],
[
article],
[
supplementary
materials], [
commentary
by
Herb Gintis], [
further
information]. I'm collaborating with Dr. Herrmann, and this work
might possibly lead to a graduate funding opportunity in 2009.
For previous projects that have been related to this work, see Christos
Bechlivanidis, Avri
Bilovich, and
Ando
Yasushi's dissertations on my
previous
dissertations page, and papers with Hagen Lehmann and Ivana Cace on
my
publications
page. Hopefully Rob Jenks' dissertation will also soon be on
the dissertations page.
Examples of possible AI projects for this year:
Adapting a Video Game to do Psychological
Experiments
This project would
involve conducting
experiments in human implicit task learning through looking at how they
perform in navigation and exploration tasks in a video game. You
would need to modify a game (probably Unreal Tournament) to include
three customized levels to correspond to the three phases of the
experiment, and also to record statistics on the subjects, for example
their route choices and their reaction times when faced with
decisions. You would also need to conduct the experiments and
write up the results formally.
Visualization and Maintenance of an Intelligent
Virtual Agent
In a recently completed
PhD project, Emmanul
Tanguy built the
Emotionally
Expressive
Facial Animation System (EE-FAS).
The
basic system
is very modular, having been built on top of
psyclone.
However,
understanding
the
architecture is not trivial for new users. This
project would involve making it easier to see what EE-FAS is doing, and
possibly to maniuplate the system. One way to do this might be to
make a general GUI tool for enhancing the usability of psyclone.
Another would be to focus on the emotion model of EE-FAS, showing their
levels and interactions, allowing the interactions to be adjusted, or
even for new basic emotions to be added. A truly exceptional
project might do all these things.
The Behavior-Oriented Design of Online World Avatars.
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. Previously
it has been applied to robots, scientific simulations an
unreal-tourament characters. We would like to extend this to
either
on-line games or VR social spaces, such as Second Life. The first
part
of the project would be evaluating games or realities for their
accessability & appropriateness to AI techniques like BOD.