Dr Joanna Bryson
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].
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-tournament
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 accessibility &
appropriateness to AI techniques like BOD.
Last modified: Monday, 9 August 2010, 07:15 AM