THIS IS A COLLECTION OF PhD/MPhil THESES PRODUCED BY STUDENTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE COGNITION AND AFFECT PROJECT

Some of the work reported below is illustrated in video demonstrations using the SimAgent toolkit here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/figs/simagent/

• 1994
  • Luc Beaudoin (PhD):
    Goal processing in autonomous agents
    Available online
    For Luc's current activities see https://cogzest.com
    He is continuing to develop themes in the CogAff project.
• 1995
  • Tim Read (PhD):
    The use of systematic design to analyse Gray's theory of emotion
    Thesis not available online.
    For a sample of his work see Applying Systemic Design to the study of `emotion'

  ---

• 1996
  • Edmund Shing (PhD):
    MEDEA: Exploring the design of a situated adaptive agent
    Thesis not available online. For a sample of his work see this conference paper:
    Computational Constraints on Associative Learning

  • Christian Paterson (MPhil):
    The use of ratings for the integration of planning and learning in a broad but shallow agent architecture.
    Online in two parts

  ---

• 1997
  • Ian Wright (PhD)
    https://sites.google.com/site/ianwrightoxford/research/philosophy-of-mind-ai
    Emotional Agents
    Thesis online (PDF and Postscript)
    Pop-11 code for the Minder1 program is available here,
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/ipw-newminder1.tar.gz modified to work with the latest version of the SimAgent toolkit.
    The program requires the Poplog system, recent versions of which include the toolkit.

    To run the program untar the file, to create a directory newminder1, then read the file GO.p into the poplog editor Ved. Compile the file with the command

        ENTER l1
    

    Then run the command that is printed out in the editor buffer.

    NOTE
    After completing his PhD here, Ian worked for Sony for a while, then went to California where he works for a games company, AiLive Inc. He now (in 2015) lives in Oxford while still working for the Californian company.
    In his "spare time" he completed a second PhD, in Economics, at the Open University, and is now an authority on political economy.
    E.g. see

     http://sites.google.com/site/ianwrightphd/Home/political-economy
    
     Cottrell, Cockshott, Michaelson, Wright, Yakovenko.
        http://sites.google.com/site/ianwrightphd/Home/political-economy
        Classical Econophysics, essays in thermodynamics, information theory and
        political economy.
        Routledge Advances in Experimental and Computable Economics.
        Routledge. 2009
    
    
    =========================
    See also
    Anupam Chakravorty, Rob Kay, Stuart Reynolds, Ian Wright
        In Gamasutra, July 27, 2010
        Taking Games Beyond Whack and Tilt
    

    ---

  • Chris Complin (PhD):
    The evolutionary engine and the mind machine: A design-based study of adaptive change
    Thesis online

    After leaving Birmingham, Chris joined a finance company (JP Morgan) and at one stage was elected "Fund Manager of the Year".

  ---

• 2001
  • Steve Allen (PhD):
    Concern processing in autonomous agents
    Available online
    Software also available. Requires Poplog and The SimAgent toolkit

  ---

2003
• Catriona Kennedy (PhD)
  Distributed reflective architectures for anomaly detection and autonomous recovery
  Available online

---

• 2004
  • Nick Hawes (PhD)
    Anytime Deliberation for Computer Game Agents
    Available online

  ---

• 2006
  • Dave Gurnell (PhD)
    A cooperative study of approaches to multi agent planning. PhD thesis, 2006. Available as [PDF].

  • Dean Petters
    Designing Agents to Understand Infants.(PDF)
    (Modelling attachment processes in infants.)

  ---

• 2007
  • Manuela Viezzer
    [2015 update: https://manuela-viezzer.squarespace.com/]
    PhdThesis: Autonomous concept formation: An architecture-based analysis (PDF)

    Thesis Abstract
    Program code is also available. Instructions for running the code are in the thesis.

    Note added 9 Jul 2017
    A publication related to Manuela's thesis work is
    Learning affordance concepts: some seminal ideas Manuela Viezzer and C.H.M. Nieuwenhuis
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/05.html#200511

    Abstract:
    Inspired by the pioneering work of J. J. Gibson, we provide a workable characterisation of the notion of affordance and we explore a possible architecture for an agent that is able to autonomously acquire affordance concepts.

    
    Note added 1 Sep 2015
    Manuela is now an artist. Some of her work can be seen here:
    http://www.saatchiart.com/manuela.viezzer
    https://manuela-viezzer.squarespace.com/

  ---

• 2010
  • Marek Kopicki
    http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/1258/
    Prediction learning in robotic manipulation (2010)
    Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham.
    Supervisor: Jeremy Wyatt Abstract:
    This thesis addresses an important problem in robotic manipulation, which is the ability to predict how objects behave under manipulative actions. This ability is useful for planning of object manipulations. Physics simulators can be used to do this, but they model many kinds of object interactions poorly, and unless there is a precise description of an object's properties their predictions may be unreliable. An alternative is to learn a model for objects by interacting with them. This thesis specifically addresses the problem of learning to predict the interactions of rigid bodies in a probabilistic framework, and demonstrates results in the domain of robotic push manipulation. During training, a robotic manipulator applies pushes to objects and learns to predict their resulting motions. The learning does not make explicit use of physics knowledge, nor is it restricted to domains with any particular physical properties. The prediction problem is posed in terms of estimating probability densities over the possible rigid body transformations of an entire object as well as parts of an object under a known action. Density estimation is useful in that it enables predictions with multimodal outcomes, but it also enables compromise predictions for multiple combined expert predictors in a product of experts architecture. It is shown that a product of experts architecture can be learned and that it can produce generalization with respect to novel actions and object shapes, outperforming in most cases an approach based on regression. An alternative, non-learning, method of prediction is also presented, in which a simplified physics approach uses the minimum energy principle together with a particle-based representation of the object. A probabilistic formulation enables this simplified physics predictor to be combined with learned predictors in a product of experts. The thesis experimentally compares the performance of product of densities, regression, and simplified physics approaches. Performance is evaluated through a combination of virtual experiments in a physics simulator, and real experiments with a 5-axis arm equipped with a simple, rigid finger and a vision system used for tracking the manipulated object.

  ---

• 2013
  • Verónica Esther Arriola Ríos
    Learning to Predict the Behaviour of Deformable Objects through and for
    Robotic Interaction (Phd thesis), University of Birmingham, 2013
    Veronica-Arriola-Rios-phd.pdf

    ABSTRACT
    Every day environments contain a great variety of deformable objects and it is not possible to program a robot in advance to know about their characteristic behaviours. For this reason, robots have been highly successful in manoeuvring deformable objects mainly in the industrial sector, where the types of interactions are predictable and highly restricted, but research in everyday environments remains largely unexplored. The contributions of this thesis are: i) the application of an elastic/plastic mass-spring method to model and predict the behaviour of deformable objects manipulated by a robot; ii) the automatic calibration of the parameters of the model, using images of real objects as ground truth; iii) the use of piece-wise regression curves to predict the reaction forces, and iv) the use of the output of this force prediction model as input for the mass-spring model which in turn predicts object deformations; v) the use of the obtained models to solve a material classification problem, where the robot must recognise a material based on interaction with it.

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• Work in progress

  PhD Students can no longer apply to work on this project.
  Aaron Sloman no longer accepts PhD students. Although formally retired, he is now working on a much broader project, which subsumes all the themes of the Cognition and Affect project, namely the Turing-inspired Meta-Morphogenesis project:
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html

  There are no funds associated with this project.

Last Updated: 7 Jul 2014; 13 Aug 2015; 1 Sep 2015

This file is maintained by Aaron Sloman:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs