Senior Researcher

Overview

I am a senior researcher in the Symbolic Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition program within NICTA.  My long term interests are in making machines that do what you tell them - even when your instructions are a little vague.  Specifically, I'm interested in the intelligence required to build such a machine.  For example, I'd like a robot that can do everything I can do.  When I tell it to clean my desk, it can.  When I tell it to go buy me some milk, it can.  I expect that we will have such robot assistants within my lifetime.

That goal is beyond what is currently possible.  It translates to a number of shorter term ressearch objectives:

• How can an intelligent system combine previous knowledge with new knowledge?  Particularly when the knowledge is in very different forms: e.g. the logical statement that "streets are usually pretty straight" is one type of knowledge and the sensor data gathered by driving an instrumented car about some local streets is another type of knowledge.
• How can data be abstracted into useful concise forms?   How do you discover good concise representations?  How do you discover those representations incrementally?

I hold a conjoint appointment in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales.   My personal web page at UNSW has some open source projects I've been working on, but is otherwise not very up to date.

Current Projects

I am currently running the ARIA project which looks to combine higher order logic with probability theory and use that for perception and planning in complex systems.

Previous Projects

I had previously been involved with the RoboCup robot soccer competition.  In particular, I lead the rUNSWift collaborative entry of NICTA and UNSW into the legged league of robocup from 2003 until 2006.

I also lead the NICTA component of the Autonomous Urban Vehicle project.  We were involved with the Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team entry into the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2007.

Contact Details

My office is on Level 3 of NICTA's Neville Roach Laboratory.  This is located in building L5 of the University of New South Wales, 223 ANZAC Pde.

Phone: +61 2 8306 0424