Senior Researcher

Overview

I am a senior researcher in the Making Sense of Data group within NICTA.  My long term research interests are in making autonomous agents — programs that think and learn, either as part of a robot or otherwise.  I'm specifically 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 a coffee, 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 research questions:

   
• How can an intelligent system build and maintain a model of its environment?  This should incorporate both prior knowledge and direct experience.  The model should handle uncertainty.
   
• How can an agent plan to achieve tasks?  As well as an agent planning for itself, this might incorporate mimicry and/or a human teacher where appropriate.  The system should handle both unknown and stochastic situations.
   
• In each of these cases there is a question as to how data can be abstracted into useful concise forms.  How do you discover good concise representations?  How do you update the representation as you learn more?  How do you efficiently reason in the concise representation?

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 working with the Intelligent Fleet Logistics project finding ways to model and predict traffic conditions.

I teach the Robot Software Architectures course at UNSW.

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.

I have also lead the Architectures for Intelligent Agents project.

Contact Details

My office is on Level 4 of NICTA's Neville Roach Laboratory. This is located in building L5 at the University of New South Wales, 223 ANZAC Pde.

Phone: +61 2 8306 0424