Joanna J Bryson

Greetings. I am a Reader [tenured Associate Professor, USA] in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. I live in Princeton, NJ, where I was a sabbatical fellow in 2015-2016 at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy and an affiliate for the following two years. I am also doing research with the Princeton Departments of Politics and Psychology.

At Bath I founded and for some years lead the Bath Intelligent Systems research group. Most of my own research is done in the context of the subgroup Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence (AmonI). Although I'm only working for Bath remotely and at 40% time, I still teach and supervise dissertation students.

I do research in both Artificial and Natural Intelligence.

Within AI, my specific research areas are action selection and systems AI. My current PhD students are working primarily on the transparency of artificial intelligence in the context of domestic robots and computer games. Transparency should lead to greater safety and accountability, as well as improved moral understanding of the role of AI in society.
NI is however my first interest. I have two degrees in the social sciences (as well as two in AI), and am currently working primarily on cultural variation in sociality and public goods investment. This includes work on understanding the causality underlying the correlation between political polarisation and income inequality. My students and I work on a variety of questions of human behaviour coming from the angle of theoretical biology, and the evolution of cognition and culture.
These two interests cross streams in policy and AI ethics. I first published in this field in 1998, and have become increasingly active in it as a speaker, writer, and consulting expert.

CV & Biography

Here is my short, industrial (2 or optionally 3 page) resumé (late 2015), and my long, academic curriculum vitae (early 2018). My web pages (particularly my publications page) are often more up-to-date than my CV.

I did a reddit Science AMA on AI and AI ethics on 13 January 2017. TechCrunch liked it.

A few takes on my biography.

Social Media, Blog, & ORCID

My main social medial presence is @j2bryson, my (fairly) professional Twitter account, although it reflects my own views, not any employer's. I have (and reliably curate) a google scholar profile. I also have a blog Adventures in Natural Intelligence, which started in 2007 mostly personal but is now mostly professional. Posts are labelled, see in particular ai, ethics, policy, or perhaps academia or futurism.

In the unlikely case that you are wondering which J J Bryson I am: here, have my ORCID.

Out of Date Professional Activities

You might try checking my CV for this stuff...more likely, my twitter stream. I'm sure it will all be mined automatically in a couple years and / or doesn't really need to be catalogued.

Organising or Programme Committee for Upcoming Workshops or Conferences:
- See my previous professional activities for old conferences etc.
Journals:

An Associate Editor for Adaptive Behavior.
On the Editorial Board for AI & Society, Connection Science, and The International Journal of Synthetic Emotions.
For a fuller list of journals I've been involved in, see Previous Academic Professional Activities or my CV.

Other Committees:

Member of the College of the EPSRC (elected for January 2006 - December 2009, yet still serving now.)
Consultant for the Modeling Religion Project, and MODeling Religion in Norway (MODRN).

Member of:
- The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB).
- The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB).
- The European Social Simulation Association (ESSA).
- The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA).
- Under departmental duress (and funding), the BCS (if it stands for anything, they don't bother saying so on their web pages.)
Affiliate or Associate of:
- Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS).
- The Bath Institute of Complex Systems (BICS).
- The Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour, The University of Edinburgh School (or something) of Informatics.
Informally hang with Bath's Biodiversity Lab and evolutionary biology people more generally.

See my Previous Academic Professional Activities for older conferences, committees, etc.

Collaborators

My closest collaborators are members of AmonI (notably my students), but I work with a number of other labs and individuals:

Since 2008 I've been working on understanding human sociality as illuminated by behavioural economics.

I was recently funded to work on this by Princeton's University Center for Human Values, with Alin Coman of Princeton Psychology, Mark Riedl of Georgia Tech, and loads of help from our students Andreas Theodorou, Kristin Siu, and Matthew Guzdial.
Early in this project (2010) I got a lot of help from Benedikt Herrmann and a little (but much appreciated) from Simon Gächter.
I was also fortunate enough to employ Simon Powers and Karolina Sylwester.
I'm currently also trying to write things with Nichola Raihani (on some data we already gathered) and maybe Erol Akçay. See also the work by my PhD students Dan Taylor and Paul Rauwolf.
It turned out a model I thought was buggy matched the data of Nolan McCarty, so this has tumbled into an exciting project accounting for why political polarisation correlates with income inequality. We had to give up and "hire" (for free) a real biologist, Alex Stewart, to help.

My work on understanding the evolution of cognition and culture has led me to working on better understanding evolution, plasticity and variation in general. Yifei Wang and I get help in this from Nick Priest, Dan Weinreich, Steve Dorus, and Sam Brown.
From 2009-2014 I accidentally got a real roboticist for a PhD student, Bidan Huang. This was a disaster, among other reasons because we didn't have a robot. Fortunately, Yiannis Demiris, Tony Belpaeme, and Aude Billard had robots they let Bidan use. Aude in particular wound up being Bidan's half supervisor, so I got to visit her group at EPFL a lot in Lausanne, which rocks.
In 2009-2010 I worked with Harvey Whitehouse and his group on explaining religion. We still talk sometimes.
In 1986, David Gunkel asked me for a laundry token when we both lived in the same building in Chicago. In 2008 he asked my opinion about an AI ethics chapter he was writing. I hated it. But nevertheless, we collaborated for some years on AI ethics. I also kept running into Alan Winfield (whose position is closer to mine both spatially and morally), and in 2017 we finally wrote something together.
My work on social behaviour began with efforts to model the intelligence of non-human primates. I've tried hard to get funding to collaborate with Julia Lehmann, and the reviewers loved our stuff, but funding agencies. Bernard Thierry and Carel van Schaik have also hosted me (and Thierry hosted one of my students) for research visits and given us papers and pointers. I also sometimes get to hang out with Robin Dunbar and Liesbeth Sterck and their colleagues.
Cyril Brom and I share an interest in helping ordinary programmers build good AI. We both worked on action selection and with computer games, though he has a larger group (but mine's better :-). We've coauthored a conference paper and a white paper, and we visit each other's universities quite frequently. Check out his group's Pogamut, which is quite an impressive games AI / teaching platform. Cyril's moved on, but Jakub Gemrot is one of his former students who visited our lab, and is carrying on the AI education & games work.
I briefly employed Dylan Evans and Veronica Sundstedt to work on Cognitive Systems Outreach. It's difficult to tell Dylan what to do, or even to plan around him, but we still see each other.
For the 2001-2002 academic year I was a postdoc in Marc Hauser's Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, where I began working with Jonathan Leong and Mark Baxter. For six of the years I've been at Bath, Mark Baxter was at Oxford in Experimental Psychology as a Wellcome Fellow. Now he's at John Hopkins and I'm at Princeton. I hope this doesn't mean I have to start reading neuroscience again too; philosophy and theoretical biology take a lot of time…
I've done a lot of work with Kris Thórisson, originally after he'd hired me at LEGO. We've published together a bit, maybe we will again (see my publications.) We still email & our students use each other's code.
In 2004 Jim Edwardson, then director of the Newcastle Institute for Ageing and Health, recruited me to help advance his work on assisting helping people with dementia. He's since retired, but his interest in assistive environments brought me in contact with the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering, which turned into Designability recently (2015) and got a big robotics grant, but now I'm not in Bath.
I sometimes work on semantics and natural language with my visiting research fellow, Will Lowe. We may start working on modelling political systems soon. We have been known to address all sorts of academic challenges together (photo credit: Hilary Till).

Ah, I've got more help on the semantics now from Arvind Narayanan and Aylin Caliskan. They aren't helping with the rhinos though.

See also my former research projects and previous collaborators.

Joanna Bryson

Last updated 22 July 2018