Effects of Transparency in Humanoid Robots - A Pilot Study
Heinrich Mellmann, Polina Arbuzova, Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos, Magdalena Yordanova, Jennifer X. Haensel, Verena V. Hafner, and Joanna J. Bryson, HRI '24: Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 750-754, 11 March 2024.
Transparency is recognized as a vital feature for understanding and predicting robot behavior. Another feature that affects interaction with robots is their anthropomorphism. The relationship between these remains under-explored but is postulated to be negative. We present a pilot study investigating the effects of robot transparency in human-robot interactions, where the robot has an anthropomorphic appearance. We asked participants to evaluate and interact with the humanoid robot Pepper to examine whether visualizing the robot’s goals and behavior affects perceived intelligence, anthropomorphism, and robot agency. Our preliminary findings suggest that users may attribute higher ratings of agency when interacting with a robot visualizing its goals. In this late-breaking report, we propose our experiment on the interplay between transparency and anthropomorphism in human-robot interaction and summarize insights from our preliminary pilot study.
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Human Experience and AI Regulation: What European Union Law Brings to Digital Technology Ethics
Joanna J. Bryson, Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society, 3(3), 2023.
Joseph Weizenbaum is famous for quitting AI after his secretary thought his chatbot, Eliza, understood her. But his ethical concerns went well beyond that, and concern not only potential abuse but also culpable lack of use of intelligent systems. Abuse includes making inhuman cruelty and acts of war more emotionally accessible to human operators or simply solving the problems necessary to make nuclear weapons, negligent lack of use of AI includes failing to solve the social issues of inequality and resource distribution. I was honoured to be asked for the Weizenbaum centenary to explain how the EU’s new digital regulations address his concerns. I first talk about whether Europe has legitimacy or capacity to do so, and then (concluding it might) I describe how the Digital Services Acts and the General Data Protection Regulation mostly do so, though I also spare some words for the Digital Markets Act (which addresses inequality) and the AI Act — which in theory helps by labelling all AI as AI. But Weizenbaum’s secretary knew Eliza was a chatbot, so the GDPR and DSA’s lines about transparency might be more important than that.
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Going Nuclear? Precedents and Options for the Transnational Governance of AI (pdf)
We argue that the current global governance regime for AI is deeply dysfunctional. GPAI, OECD, UNESCO and ITU form a set of competing actors that do not presently provide us with the necessary legitimacy and centralization that would best serve global governance of AI. But we do have a history of technological governance we can learn from, and we know the basic structure of what an organization that can govern an emerging technology can look like. Regardless of the fact that nuclear and AI safeguards will never prove to be completely comparable, many core lessons from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are straightforwardly applicable. We need a centralized agency, with political and technical capacity, with internal expertise and the right balance between accountability and political autonomy.
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Do We Collaborate With What We Design?
Katie D. Evans, Scott A. Robbins, and Joanna J. Bryson, Topics in Cognitive Science, 2023.
In this paper, we critically assess both the accuracy and desirability of using the term “collaboration” to describe interactions between humans and AI systems. We begin by proposing an alternative ontology of human–machine interaction, one which features not two equivalently autonomous agents, but rather one machine that exists in a relationship of heteronomy to one or more human agents. In this sense, while the machine may have a significant degree of independence concerning the means by which it achieves its ends, the ends themselves are always chosen by at least one human agent, whose interests may differ from those of the individuals interacting with the machine. We finally consider the motivations and risks inherent to the continued use of the term “collaboration,” exploring its strained relation to the concept of transparency, and consequences for the future of work.
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The European Parliament’s AI Regulation: Should We Call It Progress?
Meeri Haataja and Joanna J. Bryson, Amicus Curiae, Series 2, 4(3), 707-718, Spring 2023.
We here describe the outcomes of the first round of legislative action by one of the EU’s two legislative bodies, the European Parliament, in terms of modifying the Artificial Intelligence Act. The Parliament has introduced a number of changes we consider to be enormously important, some in a very good way, and some in a very bad way. At stake is whether the AI Act really brings the power and strength of product law to continuously scale improved practice on products in the EU with intelligent components, or whether the law becomes window-dressing aimed only at attacking a few elite actors post hoc. We describe here the EU process, the changes and our recommendations.
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Spamming the Regulator: Exploring a New Lobbying Strategy in EU Competition Procedures (pdf)
Marlene Jugl, William A.M. Pagel, Maria Camila Garcia Jimenez, Jean Pierre Salendres, William Lowe, Joanna J. Bryson, and Helena Malikova, Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, April 2023.
We document and examine a novel lobbying strategy in the context of competition regulation, a strategy that exploits the regulator’s finite administrative capacities. Companies with merger cases under scrutiny by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition appear to be employing a strategy of ‘spamming the regulator,’ through the strategic and cumulative submission of economic expert assessments. Procedural pressures may result in an undeservedly favorable assessment of the merger. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of an original dataset of all complex merger cases in the EU 2005–2020, we present evidence of this new strategy and a possible learning process among private actors. We suggest remedies to ensure regulatory effectiveness in the face of this novel strategy.
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The (Most) Algorithmic Animal: Unknowable Causal Structures in the Information Age
Joanna J. Bryson, Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 8(2), 115–121, November 2022.
Rituals are a means of regulation — they are a means for maintaining coherence and attaining long-term goals, including social coherence. But does their efficacy depend entirely, or at all, on their opacity? In this requested commentary on Harvey Whitehouse’s new book, The Ritual Animal, I discuss the utility of costly rituals in an evolutionary context, and suggest that causal opacity is only one, potentially substitutable cost. I relate this to the urgent topical concerns of polarization and of regulating sustainability globally.
Author’s final version, from July 2022.
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Belgian and Flemish Policy Makers’ Guide to AI Regulation
Joanna J. Bryson, KCDS-CiTiP Fellow Lectures Series: Towards an AI Regulator?, October 11, 2022.
The regulation of AI is of pressing national and international concern, yet often distracted by arguments concerning definitions and myths concerning the relevance of opacity to regulation. All software, and indeed all technological means of automating aspects of human industry and behaviour, are products of human action, and as such their production can be regulated to ensure sufficient transparency to hold their developer and operators accountable for mishaps. Indeed the processes necessary to ensure such transparency—including process audits—will reduce harms by encouraging compliance to ever-increasing standards of best practice. In this paper, I discuss social consequences of AI and digital technology, and both social and industrial benefits to coordinating their production through good governance.
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Transnational Digital Governance and Its Impact on Artificial Intelligence
Mark Dempsey, Keegan McBride, Meeri Haataja, and Joanna J. Bryson, Handbook of AI Governance, May 2022.
This chapter explores the extant governance of AI and, in particular, what is arguably the most successful AI regulatory approach to date, that of the European Union. The chapter explores core definitional concepts, shared understandings, values, and approaches currently in play. It argues that not only are the Union’s regulations locally effective, but, due to the so-called “Brussels effect,” regulatory initiatives within the European Union also have a much broader global impact. As such, they warrant close consideration. Open access version.
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Reflections on the EU’s AI Act and How We Could Make It Even Better (pdf)
Meeri Haataja and Joanna J. Bryson, CPI TechREG Chronicle, March 2022
Meeri Haataja and I wrote two papers (really, originally one long one) to inform the writing of the EU’s AI Act (AIA). Because of the importance of getting the material out to policy makers while they were still writing, we published in essentially a newsletter, who promised to publish the second part, a supplement about the costs in the next issue, then didn’t, so it’s just in arxiv for now. See What Costs Should We Expect From the EU’s AI Act?, SocArXiv, 2021
The main thrust of this article is that there is a lot of good work done in the AIA that some people with vested interests are unjustly attacking, but there are also a few things that can be improved. This may be interesting even if you don’t care about law in the EU, just if you are trying to regulate AI or the digital in your own country. See also my Wired article expanding on one aspect here: the definition of AI used in the AIA, and how that relates to the purpose of AI regulation.
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Untangling Agile Government: On the Dual Necessities of Structure and Agility
Keegan McBride, Maximilian Kupi and Joanna J. Bryson, Agile Government: Emerging Perspectives in Public Management, 21-34, 2022.
This is a super, super important topic I expect to be coming back to. The myth that dismantling infrastructure, aka “decentralising,” necessarily produces agility is pernicious and facilitates an assault on the rule of law. Open access version.
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Epidemic Modeling as a Means to Reimagine Health Education and Policy Post-COVID
Elise E. Racine and Joanna J. Bryson, Health Education, 11 November 2021.
My first summer at Hertie School I co-ran a small project with Slava Jankin on Agent Based Modelling (ABM) as (data) science in the context of public COVID policy. This paper is the sole published outcome, though see also the Webpage we put together on the project with the most useful links and papers we could find on the scientific application of ABM. This particular paper was primarily the work of the first author, who also extended it into her master’s dissertation at Hertie School.
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Two Solicited Chapters for the Collection The Love Makers
Coordinated by Aifric Campbell (2021)
Most of the book consists of her novella, Scarlett and Gurl, which I strongly, strongly recommend to everyone interested in the role of sentient-seeming AI in human society.
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Is There an AI Cold War? (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson and Helena Malikova, Global Perspectives, 2(1), 2021.
Regulation is a means societies use to create the stability, public goods, and infrastructure they need to thrive securely. This policy brief is intended to both document and to address claims of a new AI cold war: a binary competition between the United States and China that is too important for other powers to either ignore or truly participate in directly, beyond taking sides.
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Polarization Under Rising Inequality and Economic Decline
Alexander J. Stewart, Nolan McCarty, and Joanna J. Bryson, Science Advances, 6(50), Dec 2020.
This project came out of my work on cultural variation in public goods investment, crossed with getting asked on live TV whether AI was increasing inequality. I thought I’d better find out and went to talk by Nolan and learned about the correlation between inequality and polarization. I’ve been talking about this project for a couple years, but the model in the paper is entirely Alex. (I did replicate his work with an ABM, but that’s harder to analyze ... ). This has been my main research focus personally since 2016 and I’ve spoken about it a few times as a contribution to academic meetings, including EHBEA, APSA, and ICSD (well, Alex spoke about it there, I watched :-)
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The Artificial Intelligence of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Overview for Law and Regulation (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, solicited and reviewed for M. Dubber, F. Pasquale, & S. Das (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Oxford University Press, 2020.
Author’s final version, from late July 2019.
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Evolutionary Psychology and Artificial Intelligence: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Behaviour (pdf)
Holly Wilson, Paul Rauwolf, and Joanna J. Bryson, The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Shackelford, T. (ed), 2020.
Somewhat speculative, but reviewing a lot of science, including the modelling results out of our own group. Author’s final version, from July 2020.
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The Sustainability Game: AI Technology as an Intervention for Public Understanding of Cooperative Investment (pdf)
Andreas Theodorou, Bryn Bandt-Law and Joanna J. Bryson, to appear at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), August 2019.
This is the first paper unifying our transparency work, our games work, and our work on cultural variation in human cooperation and anti-social punishment. Hopefully there will be a bunch more in 2020 and 2021. Camera ready from July 2019 or so. Software on github, linked from the AmonI Software Page.
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Improving Robot Transparency: An Investigation With Mobile Augmented Reality (pdf)
Alexandros Rotsidis, Andreas Theodorou, Joanna J. Bryson, and Robert H. Wortham, to be presented at RO-MAN 2019.
Authors’ final copy. Alex (with Andreas & Rob) got ABOD3 working on mobile phones so you can point your phone at a POSH / BOD robot and see what it’s trying to do. Software is probably available on github, just checking ...
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The Past Decade and Future of AI’s Impact on Society (pdf)
This is a major policy document with my perspectives on how AI has been and should be incorporated into human society. It was originally written as a solicited white paper for the OECD on AI policy (May 2017), which I then revised to BBVA’s title (I’m almost the only person in the book who didn’t realise you could change the title). Final version submitted September 2018.
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How Society Can Maintain Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson and Andreas Theodorou, solicited and reviewed chapter (title given) in the collection Human-Centered Digitalization and Services, Marja Toivonen-Noroand Eveliina Saari (eds.), Springer, 2019.
Includes justification, motivation, strategies for systems engineering of AI, and strategies for regulating it. tl;dr see the bullet-point version in my blogpost, A smart bureaucrat’s guide to AI regulation.
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Instinct: A Biologically Inspired Reactive Planner for Intelligent Embedded Systems
Robert H. Wortham, Swen E. Gaudl and Joanna J. Bryson, Cognitive Systems Research, 57: 207-215, October 2019.
Another nice piece of work on lightweight intelligent control and systems engineering of AI. Software is available online, like most software from my group.
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Robot, All Too Human
Joanna J. Bryson, ACM XRDS, 25(3):56-59, April 2019.
Sorry Nietzsche fans, I only borrowed a little of his structure. Originally written as a blogpost.
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How Do We Hold AI Itself Accountable? We Can’t (pdf) [Draft]
This one was really rushed, I’m sure it will improve!
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Emergent Biases in Compensatory Mutation Can Drive Gene Regulatory Network Evolution [Draft]
Yifei Wang, Marios Richards, Steve Dorus, Nicholas K. Priest, and Joanna J. Bryson, bioRxiv, 2019.
Not directly AI policy, about biological innovation. Basically, mutation really can be a factor of innovation, because compensating for things that go wrong is a lot easier than you thought. We’ve been working on this for years, it’s finally submitted somewhere — that fortunately encourages biorxiv use. See also my papers with Yifei below. Version from December 2019.
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No One Should Trust AI
No one should trust AI because we ought to build it for accountability. Then we would have certain knowledge of who’s at fault, and trust isn’t needed, see the scientific trust paper just below with Paul Rauwolf as first author. Published November 2018.
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Expectations of Fairness and Trust Co-Evolve in Environments of Partial Information
Highly relevant to information technology policy: The more you know, the less you need to trust, though if you know nothing or don’t have a choice of who you work with, people have no reason to be trustworthy. Trust comes with PARTIAL information, AND at least some freedom. Open access because Bath+Springer
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Patiency Is Not a Virtue: The Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics
Both AI and Ethics are artefacts, so there is no necessary position for AI artefacts in society, rather we need to decide what we should build and how we should treat what we build. So why build something to compete for the rights we already struggle to offer 8 billion people? Gold open access paid for by Bath out of our library budget. There are also older versions of this paper which was a discussion paper for a long time, but this is the archival version.
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The Extended Ramp Model: A Biomimetic Model of Behaviour Arbitration for Lightweight Cognitive Architectures
Swen E. Gaudl and Joanna J. Bryson, Cognitive Systems Research, 50:1-9 (this journal seems to count issues as volumes), 2018.
Like the title says, an attempt to simplify and improve on the systems for representing emotions and drives I wrote with Emmanuel Tanguy and Phil Rolphshagen (the Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER) and Flexible Latching respectively, see below).
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Communication (pdf)
A summary of everything biology and biological anthropology have to say on the subject, for the benefit of roboticists in particular. Open access is as of late November 2014, a lightly updated version is now available in the Handbook.
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The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation
Miles Brundage, Shahar Avin, Jack Clark, Helen Toner, Peter Eckersley, Ben Garfinkel, Allan Dafoe, Paul Scharre, Thomas Zeitzoff, Bobby Filar, Hyrum Anderson, Heather Roff, Gregory C. Allen, Jacob Steinhardt, Carrick Flynn, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Simon Beard, Haydn Belfield, Sebastian Farquhar, Clare Lyle, Rebecca Crootof, Owain Evans, Michael Page, Joanna Bryson, Roman Yampolskiy, Dario Amodei, a technical report apparently published by all seven of the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, Center for a New American Security, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and OpenAI, 2018.
Apparently exactly one other author did even less than I did on this report; aside from turning up to the meeting I think my main contribution was insisting “use of” was in the title. Final (not peer reviewed except by the authors), February 2018.
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Of, For, and By the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons
Joanna J. Bryson, Mihailis E. Diamantis, and Thomas D. Grant, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 25(3):273–291, Sep 2017.
Two professors of law and I argue that it would be a terrible, terrible idea to make something strictly AI (in contrast to an organisation also containing humans) a legal person. In fact, the only good thing about this is that it gives us a chance to think about where legal personhood has already been overextended (we give examples). “Gold” open access, not because I think it’s right to make universities or academics pay to do their work, but because Bath has some deal with Springer / has already been coerced into paying. Notice you can read below all my papers going back to 1993 (when I started academia); I don't think “green” open access is part of the war on science.
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Semantics Derived Automatically From Language Corpora Contain Human Biases
Aylin Caliskan, Joanna J. Bryson, & Arvind Narayanan, Science, 356 (6334):183-186, 14 Apr 2017.
Be sure to also look at the supplement, which gives the stimuli and shows similar results for a different corpus and word-embedding model. Meaning really is no more or less than how a word is used, so AI absorbs true meaning, including prejudice. We demonstrate this empirically. This is an extension of my research programme into semantics originally deriving from my interest in the origins of human cognition, but now with help from the awesome researchers at Princeton I’ve merged this with my AI ethics work, and also managed to pitch for cognitive systems approaches to AI. Open access version: authors’ final copy of both the main article and the supplement (pdf).
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Standardizing Ethical Design for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems
Joanna J. Bryson and Alan F.T. Winfield, IEEE Computer, 50(5):116-119, 2017.
What do you do when technology like AI changes faster than the law can keep up? One thing is have law enforce standards maintained by professional organisations, which are hopefully more agile and informed. Invited commentary. Open access version, authors’ final copy (pdf).
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Improving Robot Transparency: Real-Time Visualisation of Robot AI Substantially Improves Understanding in Naive Observers
Robert H Wortham, Andreas Theodorou, Joanna J Bryson, in The 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2017.
What’s visualised is the system’s priorities (the upper part of a POSH plan hierarchy), and which priorities are active in real time. Extends the IJCAI ethics workshop results to direct interaction with robots, and for an archival conference.
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Agent-Based Modelling
The Meaning of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics
Joanna J. Bryson, Connection Science, 29(2):130-136, 2017.
In honour of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics’ fifth anniversary in 2016, Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy ran an AISB symposium which was followed up by a special issue of the journal Connection Science the following year. I explain the principles' utility as policy, and their intent: to clarify that we are responsible for the AI we build and use. Open access version.
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Designing and Implementing Transparency for Real Time Inspection of Autonomous Robots
Andreas Theodorou, Rob Wortham, and Joanna J. Bryson, Connection Science, 29(3):230-241, 2017.
In honour of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics' fifth anniversary in 2016, Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy ran an AISB symposium which was followed up by a special issue of the journal Connection Science the following year. Open access version.
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Principles of Robotics: Regulating Robots in the Real World
2016
In honour of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics' fifth anniversary in 2016, Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy ran an AISB symposium which was followed up by a special issue of the journal Connection Science the following year. Here are the original EPSRC Principles of Robotics as they appear on the web pages of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's (EPSRC – the UK council for funding AI research). Tony got Alan Winfield to submit an article version of the Principles with the same authors, including me.
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The Vital Need For The Unconscious City
Joanna J. Bryson, in Anthologies, Conscious Cities: Bridging Neuroscience, Architecture, and Technology, Anne Fritz and Itai Palti, eds, 2017.
A short popular science piece on the danger of everyone knowing so much no one is any longer unique.
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Smart Policies for Artificial Intelligence [Draft]
Miles Brundage and Joanna J. Bryson, 2017.
Policy and regulation don't need to kill innovation; in fact there is a great deal of policy set up to help industry innovate and flourish. We review the de facto set of policies AI already operates under, and recommend a more explicit and coherent set. Comments very much welcome.
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On the Reliability of Unreliable Information: Gossip as Cultural Memory
Dominic Mitchell, Joanna J. Bryson, Paul Rauwolf, and Gordon Ingram, Interaction Studies, 17:1 pp. 1–25, 2016.
There’s a tradeoff between how fast gossip spreads vs problems with its potential for corruption: it can be a lot more useful than direct experience if it spreads faster than that experience and there isn’t too much false information. Actually, in the real world gossip may give you more information than your perception, but that’s not one of the things we deal with here. This work was actually done prior to (and informed) our 2015 article Value Homophily Benefits Cooperation But Motivates Employing Incorrect Social Information, but took longer to get out for a few reasons. Open access draft.
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A Modular Approach to Learning Manipulation Strategies From Human Demonstration
Bidan Huang, Miao Li, Ravin Luis De Souza, Joanna J. Bryson, and Aude Billard, Autonomous Robots, 40(5): 903-927, 2016.
Precise manipulation (e.g. opening bottle caps) on real robots using social learning via contact sensors. Published online October 2015, in print June 2016. Open access available from authors, or Bath one day I hope.
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Simulation and the Evolution of Thought
I made unacknowledged contributions to this part introduction too. Open access version (pdf).
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The Confabulation of Self
I made unacknowledged contributions to this part introduction too. Open access version (pdf).
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Trust Communication, and Inequality
Joanna J. Bryson & Paul Rauwolf, from The 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 10-13 August 2016 in Philadelphia, PA.
Reviews Paul’s awesome work on understanding why it’s adaptive to both have blind faith in others in your community, yet refuse to cooperate with those making unfair but mutually-beneficial offers.
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What Does the Robot Think? Transparency as a Fundamental Design Requirement for Intelligent Systems (pdf)
Robert H Wortham, Andreas Theodorou, Joanna J Bryson, IJCAI-2016 Ethics for Artificial Intelligence Workshop.
Our first experiments on making robot intelligence more transparent.
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A Role for Action Selection in Consciousness: An Investigation of a Second-Order Darwinian Mind
Robert H. Wortham and Joanna J. Bryson, in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings, published December 2016.
The title references my earlier paper, A Role for Consciousness in Action Selection in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4(2):471-482, which I’m not sure is well enough known to take the confusion of the joke, but this paper has a fun model of selection for metacognition, mostly by Rob.
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Artificial Intelligence and Pro-Social Behaviour
This brings together all three threads of my research: action selection, natural cognition and collective behaviour, and the mischaracterisation of AI as an active threat. In response to the apocalyptic futurism typified by Bostrom’s Superintelligence, I frame AI as an ordinary part of human culture, which for 10,000 years has included physical artefacts that enhance our cognitive capacities, and is apocalyptic enough in its own right. Open access: here’s the post-review submitted version from September 2014, or email me for the corrected final.
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Recombination Is Surprisingly Constructive for Artificial Gene Regulatory Networks in the Context of Selection for Developmental Stability
Yifei Wang, Yinghong Lan, Daniel Weinreich, Nick Priest and Joanna J. Bryson, in the proceedings of The 13th European Conference on Artificial Life, July 20-24, 2015, York, UK.
The title says it all, except I think that I think we may be onto something really significant for machine learning as well as theoretical biology here.
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Value Homophily Benefits Cooperation But Motivates Employing Incorrect Social Information
Paul Rauwolf, Dominic Mitchell, and Joanna J. Bryson, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 367:246–261, 2015.
Preferring to cooperate with those with a similar cooperation style supports the evolution of cooperation. Reputations spread through gossip supports this strategy. But now that you are spreading two kinds of information (reputations of others, and your own style of cooperation) you can have a conundrum when these conflict. When there is such a conflict, signalling honestly about your cooperation strategy can be more beneficial to your community than telling the truth about someone else. Free open access draft is here. Software is coming soon. Draft is from October 2014, yet the work originally derived from On the Reliability of Unreliable Information: Gossip as Cultural Memory, which came out in 2016. Such is academia.
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Learning from Play: Facilitating Character Design Through Genetic Programming and Human Mimicry
Swen E. Gaudl, Joseph Carter Osborn, and Joanna J. Bryson, from Progress in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of 17th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2015, Coimbra, Portugal, September 8-11, 2015.
Also solving AI through social learning, this time game character strategies derived from human game traces. Open access camera ready version.
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Replicators, Lineages, and Interactors
Daniel J. Taylor and Joanna J. Bryson, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 37, Issue 03, pp 276-277, June 2014.
A commentary on Paul Smaldino’s The Cultural Evolution of Emergent Group-Level Traits. Open access version.
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Understanding and Addressing Cultural Variation in Costly Antisocial Punishment (pdf)
This book follows from a workshop. Here is a free version of the chapter, the revised draft from May 2013. See further our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page. Note: Google Scholar managed to find a USAF white paper derived from our final report by the same title which has a lot of irrelevant detail and a couple theoretical errors we’ve since discovered. The book chapter is 15 months more recent.
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Evolving Evolvability in the Context of Environmental Change: A Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) Approach
Yifei Wang, Stephen G. Matthews and Joanna J. Bryson, Artificial Life 2014.
Interesting for both biology & machine learning, looks at the role of a potentially-hierarchical network representation in the genome for handling semi-predictable environmental change. Final version is open access, because computer science has archival conferences.
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The Extended Ramp Goal Module: Low-Cost Behaviour Arbitration for Real-Time Controllers based on Biological Models of Dopamine Cells
Swen Gaudl has been working on improving the emotional / durative action selection work I started with Emmanuel Tanguy (see below.) Swen’s published two papers on his new Extended Ramp Goal (ERGo) model. See also: A Biomimetic Model of Behaviour Arbitration for Lightweight Cognitive Architectures, Swen E. Gaudl and Joanna J. Bryson, to appear in Philosophy and Computers, a newsletter of the American Philosophical Association (Peter Boltuc, ed.).
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The Role of Emotions in Inter-Action Selection
Jekaterina Novikova, Leon Watts and Joanna J. Bryson, Interaction Studies, 15 (2), pp. 216-223, 2014.
A commentary on Social Behaviours in Dog-Owner Interactions Can Serve as a Model for Designing Social Robots in the same issue. Submitted version is open access.
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The Role of Stability in Cultural Evolution: Innovation and Conformity in Implicit Knowledge Discovery
Some simple simulations of culture and modularity showing interesting stability effects, inspired by a talk Dan Sperber gave in 2008. Open access draft from 2010. Open source netlogo model described in the paper on the AmonI Software Page.
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The Conceptualisation of Emotion Qualia: Semantic Clustering of Emotional Tweets
A chapter length description of our attempt to use social media as a source for a more accurate portrayal of the space of human emotions. Derived from Eugene Bann’s undergraduate dissertation. A more recent paper by the same authors on a related topic came out in 2013 ...
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Homo Homini Lupus? Explaining Antisocial Punishment
A review article; see further our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page. If you don’t have access to APA, here is the revised final version submitted to the publisher (May 2013).
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Learning Motion Primitives of Object Manipulation Using Mimesis Model
Bidan Huang, Joanna J. Bryson and Tetsunari Inamura, presented at Robotics and Biomimetics (IEEE-ROBIO) in December 2013.
Describes a system of biases for allowing machine learning by observation of sequences of behaviour. Final version from November 2013.
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Measuring Cultural Relativity of Emotional Valence and Arousal using Semantic Clustering and Twitter
Eugene Y. Bann and Joanna J. Bryson, Proceedings of Cognitive Science, 2013.
Considers the most common “emotion” keywords on Twitter, and discovers that some concepts, e.g. sleepiness and sadness, are relatively culturally invariant, but others like “surprise” and “stressed” seem to be used quite differently in different global regions. Also, Europeans are the most positive and excited tweeters. Camera-ready from April 2013.
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Behaviour Oriented Design for Real-Time-Strategy Games: An Approach on Iterative Development for StarCraft AI
Swen Gaudl, Simon Davies and Joanna J. Bryson, Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), Chania, Crete 14-17 May 2013.
Describes Simon Davies’ undergraduate project on building strategic game AI, as extended using Swen Gaudl’s new version of ABODE.
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Emotionally Driven Robot Control Architecture for Human-Robot Interaction
Learning a Real Time Grasping Strategy
Like the title says. Work conducted at EPFL.
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Natural Action Selection, Modeling
Seth, A.K. and Bryson J.J., in H. Pashler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Mind. Sage, pp.557-559, 2013.
Author’s final version (pdf) from August 2009 (I only found out this ever got published in 2017.)
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The Role for Simulations in Theory Construction for the Social Sciences: Case Studies Concerning Divergent Modes of Religiosity
Harvey Whitehouse, Ken Kahn, Michael E. Hochberg, and Joanna J. Bryson, Religion, Brain & Behaviour, 2(3):182-224 (including commentaries and response), 2012.
I’m particularly pleased about this paper because it shows clearly how models can advance even well-established social-scientific theories provided that we work directly with domain experts who really understand the theory and data. There are some very pithy, quotable text about this in our response to commentaries, From the Imaginary to the Real: The Back and Forth Between Reality and Simulation. Open access pre-proof version of the target article, and of the response to commentaries. Associated software is available from the AmonI software page, and also in the electronic appendix. Oxford Anthropology have made a web page about our simulation of religion work.
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Punishment Can Promote Defection in Group-Structured Populations
Simon T. Powers, Daniel J. Taylor and Joanna J. Bryson, The Journal of Theoretical Biology, 311:107-116, 2012.
Penultimate version on arXiv. This paper shows that punishment alone can’t explain altruism, the papers that thought it could didn’t take into account the well-documented behaviour of anti-social punishment. Basically, some people punish those that contribute to the public good. This is the first article of at least five we expect to publish explaining this phenomenon, and why it varies by culture. See our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page.
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A Role for Consciousness in Action Selection
The role is not so much for immediate selection, but for updating models for future selection. In case you don’t have access, here’s the submitted draft from July 2012.
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Patiency Is Not a Virtue: Suggestions for Co-Constructing an Ethical Framework Including Intelligent Artefacts
Joanna Bryson, appeared in The Machine Question: AI, Ethics and Moral Responsibility, (Gunkel, Bryson and Torrance, eds, see above), pp. 73-75, 2012, but there’s a nice new version now, see 2016.
Argues that both ethical systems and robots are artefacts of our society, so we have a good deal of control over whether we choose to make our agents moral subjects. Doing so would be a displacement of responsibility that currently rests in us, and that displacement probably isn’t justified or advisable. There are newer, better versions of this paper in 2018.
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Structuring Intelligence: The Role of Hierarchy, Modularity and Learning in Generating Intelligent Behaviour (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, from McFarland, D., Stenning, K. and McGonigle-Chalmers, M. (eds.) The Complex Mind, on Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.
An invited chapter for a book written in honour of the late Brendan McGonigle. The chapter mostly takes a neuro and psychological approach, but last section is Eco Evo Devo, with some ideas I’ve been working on lately on the origins of cognition. This is the draft sent to the publisher in March 2010.
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Agent-Based Models as Scientific Methodology: A Case Study Analysing the DomWorld Theory of Primate Social Structure and Female Dominance (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, Yasushi Ando & Hagen Lehmann, from Modelling Natural Action Selection (Seth, Prescott & Bryson eds.), CUP, 2011.
The discussion is updated from our 2007 PTRS-B article, though the models are not. Penultimate draft from 2010, related (including improved) software is available here.
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Modelling Natural Action Selection
An expanded and updated version of our 2007 PTRS-B special issue which was a condensed version of our 2005 conference proceedings. I think this is the last version of this work we’ll see since we’ve now run through all the primary permutations for the order of the editors (see below).
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Just an Artifact: Why Machines Are Perceived as Moral Agents (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson and Philip P. Kime, in the proceedings of The Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '11).
Final camera-ready version from April 2011. This is a substantial updating & improvement of one of my (and Phil’s) very first papers “Just Another Artifact” which we gave at a workshop in 1998.
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An Agent-Based Model of the Effects of a Primate Social Structure on the Speed of Natural Selection (pdf)
Gideon M. Gluckmann & Joanna J. Bryson, in Evolutionary Computation and Multi-Agent Systems and Simulation (ECoMASS) at GECCO 2011 in Dublin.
The paper is final from April 2011.
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A Role for Consciousness in Action Selection (pdf) [Draft]
Joanna J. Bryson, in Proceedings of the AISB 2011 Symposium Machine Consciousness.
Post-final version with typos corrected & a sensible citation style from April 2011. There’s now an improved journal version, see 2012 above
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Procedural Quests: A Focus for Agent Interaction in Role-Playing-Games (pdf)
John Grey and Joanna J. Bryson, in Proceedings of the AISB 2011 Symposium AI & Games.
Final version from March 2011.
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Flexible Latching: A Biologically-Inspired Mechanism for Improving the Management of Homeostatic Goals
Discusses a simple add-on mechanism for dynamic plans to allow sensible ordering of high-level drives, and explains why this problem is different from detailed action selection. Lots of experiments, some maths and some discussion of the literature on cognitive control in natural and artificial intelligence. Associated software comes with the standard python/jython distribution of BOD.
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Crude, Cheesy, Second-Rate Consciousness (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, from the proceedings of Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems (BICS) 2010.
This is an update of the AISB update of the Vienna Consciousness paper. The next step should be a journal article. The title is a reference to a Dennett quote well worth knowing. The paper claims we already have conscious robots and it’s not that big of a deal. It also puts forward some cool ideas about the functional role of the action-selection-related process that we experience as consciousness.
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Cultural Ratcheting Results Primarily from Semantic Compression (pdf)
Discriminates the size of a culture (how much information can be transmitted from one generation to the next) from its extent (how much useful behaviour can be generated) and argues that the vast majority of cultural ratcheting is because the size of human culture finally got large enough that cultural evolution could start increasing its extent.
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Robots Should Be Slaves (pdf)
The chapter says companion is the wrong metaphor for robots, which leads to the misallocation of both resources and responsibility to the detriment of our society. Draft from 21 May 2009.
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Building Persons Is a Choice
Joanna J. Bryson, an invited commentary on an article by Anne Foerst called Robots and Theology, in Erwägen Wissen Ethik, 20(2):195-197, 2009.
It isn’t that AI couldn’t conceivably deserve ethical obligation, rather it would be unethical for us to allow it to. See further my page on ethics and AI.
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Age-Related Inhibition and Learning Effects: Evidence from Transitive Performance (pdf)
Joanna Bryson, in Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2009) pp. 3040-3045.
The paper is a scientific consequence of the ideas put forward in “Crude, Cheesy, Second-Rate Consciousness” (see below), and the work I am doing on understanding the evolution of cognition. It concerns the tradeoffs between individual and genetic learning, and whether these may be shifted on the basis of individual experience over an agent’s life history. Evidence is derived from models of macaque task learning. Camera ready from April 2009. Associated software comes with the standard lisp distribution of BOD.
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Crude, Cheesy, Second-Rate Consciousness (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, presented at the 2nd AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy in April 2009.
Final draft from March 2009. An earlier, shorter version discussing Dennett more directly is listed under 2008. The scientific ideas (without mention of robots or consciousness) are supported in my CogSci09 paper, above.
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Representations Underlying Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (pdf)
The version linked from the title is the penultimate draft from December 2008.
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The Role of Modularity in Stabilizing Cultural Evolution: Conformity and Innovation in an Agent-Based Model (pdf) [Draft]
Joanna J. Bryson, Proceedings of the Fall AAAI Symposium on Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts (AACC-08), Washington DC, November 2008.
Associated software is on the AmonI software page.
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Improved Animal-Like Maintenance of Homeostatic Goals via Flexible Latching (pdf) [Draft]
Philipp Rohlfshagen and Joanna J. Bryson, Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, Washington DC, November 2008.
Associated software comes with the standard python/jython distribution of BOD.. As of 2010 there is a much clearer journal version of this, see above.
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Crude, Chessy, Second-Rate Consciousness (pdf) [Draft]
An extended, peer-reviewed version of this paper appears above under 2009.
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Embodiment vs. Memetics
Joanna J. Bryson, in Mind & Society, 7(1):77-94, May 2008.
Discusses the importance of the discovery that human-like semantics can be learned simply from observing large corpora, with ramifications for the evolution of language. The final version is from November 2007, here is a penultimate draft (pdf) from August for those who do not subscribe, although it has a couple gaffs in it.
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The Impact of Durative State on Action Selection (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, appeared in Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior at the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposia at Stanford in March.
This is a somewhat pedantic overview of the improvements we’ve made to BOD, POSH and of course AI action selection in general in the last three years, with an eye to pleasing the EPSRC since my grant with the same title just ran out. Final version from January 2008.
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Effects of Mass Media and Opinion Exchange on Extremist Group Formation (pdf)
Steven Butler and Joanna J. Bryson, in the proceedings of ESSA 2007.
Final version from 25 June 2007. Associated software.
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Modelling Primate Social Order: Ultimate and Proximate Explanations (pdf) [Draft]
Hagen Lehman and Joanna J. Bryson, 2007.
A peek at the new model we’re building of the egalitarian / despotic variation in primate social order. (Lest you think we only criticise other people’s!) DRAFT from April 2007.
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Agent-Based Models as Scientific Methodology: A Case Study Analysing Primate Social Behaviour
This paper talks about how ABM fits in as a part of scientific methodology, and in particular analyzes as a case study the macaque social structure simulation in Hemelrijk’s DomWorld. The DomWorld link includes the associated software. An earlier version of this paper with the predictions and not the full analysis appears under 2005 below (Lehmann et al). Green open access draft.
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Modelling Natural Action Selection
Camera ready from April 2007.
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Introduction. Modelling Natural Action Selection
This is actually quite a substantial article which covers the concept of action selection far more thoroughly than any other article in the two issues. I strongly recommend reading it. Written in April 2006.
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Mechanisms of Action Selection
Joanna J. Bryson (ed), special issue, Adaptive Behavior, 15(1), March 2007.
Camera ready from December 2006.
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Mechanisms of Action Selection: Introduction to the Special Issue
That is actually just four pages, two of which introduce the articles. The first two pages though are an essay on the problem of action selection — it’s history & current status as a research problem. Written in December 2006.
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Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development
Ivana Cace really did all the work.
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Representations for Action Selection Learning from Real-Time Observation of Task Experts (pdf)
Mark Wood and Joanna J. Bryson, in IJCAI 2007, presented in Hyderabad in January 2007.
This paper expands on the COIL system (presented first and more completely in the IEEE journal article) for imitation learning, showing how adding solid Bayesian representations improves both performance and extendibility. Final version from October 2006.
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Emotions as Durative Dynamic State for Action Selection (pdf)
Emmanuel A. R. Tanguy, Phil J. Willis and Joanna J. Bryson, in IJCAI 2007, presented in Hyderabad in January 2007.
The 6-page version of the AI part of Emmanuel’s PhD on the Dynamic Emotion Representation, which may more generally be useful for selection problems that fall between long-term potentiation (learning) and nerve-cell firing (acting). Associated software.
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Skill Acquisition Through Program-Level Imitation in a Real-Time Domain
This paper presents an imitation learning system called COIL (inspired by Deb Roy’s CELL) capable of learning tasks in a dynamic real-time environment (Unreal Tournament). If you don’t subscribe to IEEE, here is a draft from May 2006. An even older version is Bath Technical report CSBU-2005-16.
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Primate Errors in Transitive ‘Inference’: A Two-Tier Learning Model (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson and Jonathan C.S. Leong, Animal Cognition, 10(1)1-15, 2007.
A model of transitive inference as the implicit learning of relationships between context-action pairs. The first version of this work appeared in my dissertation in 2001. Associated software. I also wrote a bibtex style for this article / journal: animalcog.bst.
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Agent Based Modelling of Communication Costs: Why Information Can Be Free (pdf)
Ivana Cace and Joanna J. Bryson, in Emergence of Communication and Language on Springer, edited by Caroline Lyon, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and Angelo Cangelosi, 2007.
Shows that the tendency to communicate information can be adaptive even though it has immediate costs to the communicators and there are free riders / information hoarders around the place. A chapter-length extension of Cace & Bryson ’05. Version from early March 2006.
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POSH Tools for Game Agent Development by Students and Non-Programmers (pdf)
Cyril Brom, Jakub Gemrot, Michal B´ıda, Ondrej Burkert, Sam J. Partington and Joanna J. Bryson, in the proceedings of CGAMES06.
Talks about the work we and Prague have done on extending our BOD UT framework, kind of a “best of” summary paper from the games perspective. Final version from Nov 2006.
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Action Selection for Intelligent Systems (pdf)
Integrating Life-Like Action Selection into Cycle-Based Agent Simulation Environments (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, Tristan J. Caulfield and Jan Drugowitsch, in the proceedings of Agent 2005.
Documents BOD/MASON. It came out in 2006 because it took us a while to get everything working & written about (thanks Jan!). Version from July 2006.
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A Dynamic Emotion Representation Model Within a Facial Animation System (pdf)
This paper presents a Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER) model, its implementation and an instance of a full humanoid emotional model built with it. Penultimate draft version from May or June 2006. A longer version (which I think is more interesting though some terminology is wrong) is also a Bath technical report CSBU-2005-14, from November 2005
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The Attentional Spotlight (pdf)
Jon Dorbolo wanted someone to write about Dan Dennett and Cog, and apparently Dennett suggested me! This isn’t the usual kind of thing I write — it’s mostly anecdotes and amateur philosophy — but people like it. Talks about Cog’s first years, modular AI, philosophy of science, being a grad student, and a bit about memetics. Written in May 2005.
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Tolerance and Sexual Attraction in Despotic Societies: A Replication and Analysis of Hemelrijk (2002) [pdf]
Final, 18 June 2005. Extended in 2006 (printed in 2007), see above.
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Edited Conference Proceedings: Modelling Natural Action Selection: Proceedings of an International Workshop (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, Tony J. Prescott and Anil K. Seth, published by AISB, Sussex UK, 2005.
For more information, see the MNAS Home Page, July 2005
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The Behavior Oriented Design of an Unreal Tournament Character (pdf)
Samuel J. Partington and Joanna J. Bryson, in the proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents 2005.
A case study of using BOD, presents a very complicated POSH plan. Final version is copyright Springer. Updated 23 June 2005.
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The Significance of Textures for Affective Interfaces (pdf)
Shows that what picture is on a VR face has very significant impact on how the emotions are perceived. Final version is copyright Springer. Updated 23 June 2005
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Learning Discretely: Behaviour and Organisation in Social Learning
Joanna J. Bryson and Mark Wood, Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, 2005.
Talks about memetics, task learning, neuroscience and VR games — what more could you ask? Updated 16 January 2005.
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Why Information Can Be Free (pdf)
Ivana Cace and Joanna J. Bryson, Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication (EELC'05).
Shows that the tendency to communicate information can be adaptive even though it has immediate costs to the communicators and there are free riders / information hoarders around the place. Updated 16 January 2005. Extended in 2006, see above.
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Evidence of Modularity From Primate Errors During Task Learning (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, in the proceedings of the Ninth Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW '04).
Relates my transitive inference work to the localist vs. modularist neural representation debate that used to be a big deal at NCPW. Final: 29 Dec 2004.
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Modularity and Specialized Learning: Reexamining Behavior-Based Artificial Intelligence (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, in the Proceedings of The Third International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL'04): Developing Social Brains.
A slightly longer & less informative version was presented at Adaptive Behavior in Anticipatory Learning Systems (ABiALS'02), but missed being in the proceedings due to an error on my part. Final version: 20 September 2004.
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Now for the Tricky Bit ...
(Originally “Consciousness Is Easy, but Learning Is Hard”) Joanna Bryson, invited article for The Philosopher's Magazine 28(4):70-72, 2004
Explains that everything with RAM has functional self awareness, video cameras have perfect memory, what makes us intelligent (and is computationally difficult) is generalising from experience, which involves forgetting / unconsciousness. PDF wanted … but you can get the first third of the article from the link.
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Talk/Abstract: Language Needs a 2nd Order Representations + A Rich Memetic Substrate (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, presented at Evolution of Language, Leipzig, April 2004.
Updated 14 November 2003.
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Action Selection and Individuation in Agent Based Modelling (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, in The Proceedings of Agent 2003: Challenges of Social Simulation, David L. Sallach and Charles Macal, eds.
As final as you’ll see here; updated 26 April 2004. HTML
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The Behavior-Oriented Design of Modular Agent Intelligence (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, in the Proceedings of Agent Technology and Software Engineering (AgeS 02), edited by Jörg P. Müller.
A practical guide to Behavior-Oriented Design (BOD). The final version is © Springer. Updated 27 November 2002
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Agent-Based Composite Services in DAML-S: The Behavior-Oriented Design of an Intelligent Semantic Web (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, David Martin, Sheila I. McIlraith, Lynn Andrea Stein, in Web Intelligence, Springer 2003, Ning Zhong, Jiming Liu, and Yiyu Yao, eds.
This is a longer, more detailed version of our IEEE Computer (2002) paper.
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Where Should Complexity Go? Cooperation in Complex Agents with Minimal Communication (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, in the proceedings of the First GSFC/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC), 2003.
Discusses when to use communication between agents in a multi-agent system vs. when to use behavior arbitration between modules in a modular single agent. Shows code from the primate colony simulation I’m working on with Jessica Flack. Final version is © Springer-Verlag. Updated 3 July 2002.
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Language Isn’t Quite That Special
Updated 10 Dec, 2002. BBS called the issue this got printed in ‘Dec 2002’ but it must have come out in 2003! Well, I try to keep this page in sync with the actual publication dates, maybe that’s crazy … HTML
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Action Selection for an Artificial Life Model of Social Behavior in Non-Human Primates (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson and Jessica Flack. Three-page abstract presented at Self-Organization and Evolution of Social Behaviour., 2002
Talks about exciting new research I hope to be spending more time on one day. Updated 6 June, 2002 (older, 8 page version from 30 March, 2001).
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Semantic Web Services as Behavior-Oriented Agents (pdf)
David Martin, Sheila I. McIlraith, Lynn Andrea Stein and Joanna J. Bryson, 2002.
We wrote two versions of the same paper. This is the shorter and somewhat cleaner one. IEEE Computer rewrote this a bit into something called Toward Behavioral Intelligence in the Semantic Web for a special issue. More technical details are in a Springer chapter which can be found above under 2003. Both the book and the IEEE Computer special issue are about Web Intelligence, and edited by Ning Zhong, Jiming Liu, and Yiyu Yao. The papers recommend that the semantic web be viewed as containing intelligence, not just information. They also provide recommendations for altering the DAML-S spec. to better support this. Read about it in Russian. Updated 25 July, 12 October & 7 July 2002, respectively.
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Representing Cognitive Phenomena in Biological Systems (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, 2002.
An invited 3-page rant (plus 1 page of references) about modularity and ‘cognition’. May be coming out in a book edited by Alex Meystel. Updated 22 May 2002.
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What Monkeys See and Don’t Do: Agent Models of Safe Learning in Primates (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson and Marc D. Hauser, in the proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Safe Learning Agents, 2002.
A position paper, describes the importance of constraints in learning in artificial and natural agents. Final revision, 21 January 2002.
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Intelligent Control Requires More Structure than the Theory of Event Coding Provides
Updated Nov 13, 2001. HTML
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Embodiment vs. Memetics: Does Language Need a Physical Plant?
I describe my model of how language connects to modular embodied intelligence in nature, and what this implies for AI. Just a position/review paper, no novel results, but good fun. Updated October, 2001. Er ... my revisions were made far too late to make the proceedings, but the original (pdf) isn’t very clear! There is now an even more revised version, see 2007.
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Intelligence by Design (pdf)
PhD Dissertation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2001.
Joanna Joy Bryson (postscript version). Warning: that version is 344 pages long, due to 140 pages of lisp code. I have broken the dissertation into its main text, code appendices and bibliography, (all in postscript), in the likely event you just want to read the text. You can also email me to ask for a copy of the printed Tech Report, which is paperback-like and doesn’t have the code. The files above are from the TR, which is clearer than the submitted dissertation (pdf). I also have had the Intelligence by Design Thesis Defense materials online since just after that 30 April 2001 defense.
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Modularity and Design in Reactive Intelligence (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson and Lynn Andrea Stein (postscript), from IJCAI 2001.
A 6-page summary of my dissertation, including a description of BOD, differences between reactive agent architectures, and an overly brief example of using BOD. Final from April 10, 2001.
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How-To: How to Make a Monkey Do Something Smart (pdf)
2001
A brief document about Behavior Oriented Design (BOD). Slightly modified April 18, 2001.
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Dragons, Bats & Evil Knights: A Three-Layer Design Approach to Character Based Creative Play
Joanna Bryson and Kris Thórisson. Final version appeared in Virtual Reality, 5(2):57-71, a special issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents edited by Daniel Ballin, 2000.
Article concerns the design of constructive narratives. Describes SoL (a hybrid architecture composed of Edmund and Ymir), a slightly modified form of BOD to support SoL, and our experiences developing AI for constructive narratives at LEGO. Draft version from 18 Dec. 2000.
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Modularity and Specialized Learning: Mapping Between Agent Architectures and Brain Organization (pdf)
Joanna Bryson and Lynn Andrea Stein (postscript version), from the proceedings of EmerNet2000 (Emerging computational neural network architectures based on neuroscience). Final version is © Springer-Verlag.
Discusses the relationship between agent architectures and neuroscience, and proposes a model for an agent capable of developing its own behavior / skill modules as well as learning new patterns of behavior. Target audience is neuroscientists and computer scientists interested in expanding neural networks to exploit modularity and specialized learning. Updated 3 December 2000.
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Modularity and Specialized Learning in the Organization of Behavior (pdf)
Joanna Bryson and Lynn Andrea Stein (postscript), presented at NCPW6 in September 2000, in the proceedings. Final version is © Springer-Verlag.
Summary: This chapter is similar to the EMERNET one just above, but shorter (10 vs 15 pages) and focuses on my BOD systems rather than agent architectures in general. Targeted for psychologists and cognitive scientists who use neural networks to model human behavior. Updated 30 October 2000.
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Hypothesis Testing for Complex Agents (pdf)
Joanna Bryson, Will Lowe and Lynn Andrea Stein (postscript), in the proceedings of the NIST Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems held in August 2000 (original website).
Talks in detail about experimental method and the development of complex (even socially competent) agents. Updated July 2000.
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Architectures and Idioms: Making Progress in Agent Design (pdf)
Joanna Bryson and Lynn Andrea Stein (postscript), presented at ATAL 2000, now a book chapter, the final version is © Springer-Verlag, 2000.
Summary: discusses the importance of methodology and the utility of alternative architectures — among other contributions, it distinguishes between these. Also gives a good one-page summary of what reactive planning really is. We suggest that the most useful thing to do with a new architecture is to identify its contributions and then express them in terms of one or more main-stream architectures. An extended example is made of an idiom we call a Basic Reactive Plan, taken from my architecture, Edmund, among other places. Updated 29 October 2000.
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Agent Development Tools
Joanna Bryson, Keith Decker, Scott DeLoach, Michael Huhns and Michael Wooldridge, also at ATAL, 2000.
This is a synopsis of a panel discussion, with a fine two-page rant from me I still stand by. There’s a free version on Scott DeLoach’s publications page.
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Hierarchy and Sequence vs. Full Parallelism in Reactive Action Selection Architectures
Joanna Bryson, in The Sixth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2000) (Note: there’s a pdf version with an extra blank page.)
Summary: demonstrates that hierarchy does not necessarily lead to a reduction of performance, even in highly dynamic environments. An illustration (with statistical evaluation) of the importance of clean design approaches to creating good AI systems. A shorter, less clear version of this paper appeared in Intelligent Virtual Agents 2, 1999. Final version; published in August 2000.
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Making Modularity Work: Combining Memory Systems and Intelligent Processes in a Dialog Agent (PDF)
First published description of BOD, uses dialog systems for the examples. Final from March 2000.
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A Proposal for the Humanoid Agent-Builders League (HAL) [pdf]
See further my AI and Society web page. Final from March 2000.
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Cross-Paradigm Analysis of Autonomous Agent Architecture (pdf)
Summary: article about trends in agent architectures and what they imply about optimal strategies for designing intelligence.
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The Study of Sequential and Hierarchical Organisation of Behaviour via Artificial Mechanisms of Action Selection (pdf)
Joanna Joy Bryson, MPhil Dissertation: University of Edinburgh, Faculty of Social Sciences (Department of Psychology), 2000.
That is the 173-page 11-point 1.5-spaced PDF version, with a little source code my examiners asked for. There’s also a 94-page 10-point single-spaced compressed postscript version with no source code. Complete source code is available at the bottom of this page. Summary: gives evidence for the need for structured control from three sources: the history of AI agent architectures, my experiments in two domains (robotics and artificial life), and a review of the neurological / behavioral literature. Also discusses the dialect differences between Psychology and AI, and AI as a research tool for Psychology. Final corrections, January 2000.
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Creativity by Design: A Character Based Approach to Creating Creative Play (pdf)
Joanna Bryson, in the AISB Symposium on AI and Creativity in Entertainment in April 1999.
Summary: another proto-BOD paper, talks about combining Edmund with another agent architecture, Ymir, in the context of virtual reality characters. More about SoL, Ymir and the project is in the “Dragons, Bats & Evil Knights” paper above; some of the technical details of implementing Edmund’s POSH architecture in SoL are in “Architectures and Idioms” paper also above.
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Agent Architecture as Object Oriented Design
Joanna Bryson and Brendan McGonigle, presented in Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages 1997, and published in Intelligent Agents IV by Springer in 1998.
Summary: a proto-BOD paper, this describes developing behaviors and control scripts in a way similar to developing object hierarchies in OOD. Also mentions the way I have localized learning in the behavior libraries.
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Just Another Artifact: Ethics and the Empirical Experience of AI
Joanna Bryson and Phil Kime, presented at the Fifteenth International Congress on Cybernetics, 1998, but only partially appearing in their proceedings.
We kept trying to make a journal version of this paper & finally in 2011 put a version into IJCAI which is I think a lot better. See also my AI and Society page.
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Cognition Without Representational Redescription
Joanna Bryson and Will Lowe, 1997.
A commentary on Dana H. Ballard, Mary M. Hayhoe, Polly K. Pook, and Rajesh P. N. Rao, Deictic Codes for the Embodiment of Cognition; both articles appeared in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS) in late 1997.
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Specialized Learning and the Design of Intelligent Agents [Draft]
Joanna Bryson, 1997, old PhD proposal cum journal article under revision.
On the potential equivalence and trade-offs between control state and learning — it’s pretty rough in places but apparently also interesting (according to the reviewers). This has been extended into two chapters of my PhD dissertation, the ones about learning. Maybe this year I’ll resubmit it …
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The Design of Learning for an Artifact
Joanna Bryson, from the AISB96 workshop on Learning in Robots and Animals. (There's also an older, longer version about Cog.)
Learning in animals seems to be highly specialized and constrained as much as possible, primarily to things that cannot be learned in evolutionary time scales. As developers of behavior-based AI, we largely take on the role of evolutionary learning ourselves. Our robots or avatars should only have the special-purpose sorts of learning built-in to their everyday actions.
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Modular Adaptivity and Behavior Based Control [Draft]
Joanna Bryson, 1996.
A short paper which discusses the role of episodic memory in navigation. I got some of this working on my robot, see my MPhil thesis, but some of it still needs to get worked out and written up ...
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Primitive Parallax and Parallax Primitives (pdf) [Draft]
Joanna Bryson, 1995.
My only machine vision paper (so far), written in the context of MIT’s (Rod Brooks & Lynn Andrea Stein’s) Cog project. In late 1994, still basically the only thing that worked on the robot was its cameras, and I needed to do some research (and get the thing closer to being a person) so I used those. This was submitted to the European Conference on Artificial Life, and accepted but only as a poster with a brief abstract. In 2024 I found this PDF on an Internet research paper archive; I have no idea how it got there.
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The Use of State in Intelligent Control [Draft]
Joanna Bryson, 1995.
This short paper compares Shakey and Genghis, and demonstrates the necessity of using control state even in the simplest reactive system. I’m not sure anyone cares enough for me to ever get this one published! But I still think it could be useful for some people. (The original Genghis didn’t actually back up and turn when it bumped into something with a feeler. It just lifted its leg higher. Ooops. Oh well, the same arguments still all apply. The behavior I described was on the commercial version of Genghis available then from ISR (now iRobot)).
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The Reactive Accompanist: Adaptation and Behavior Decomposition in a Music System
Joanna Bryson, in Luc Steels (ed.) The Biology and Technology of Intelligent Autonomous Agents, 1994.
Describes my MSc project, is also the first place I suggest adaptive requirements can serve as a key to determining how to decompose intelligence into modularized behaviors (key point in BOD).
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The Reactive Accompanist: Applying Subsumption Architecture to Software Design
Edinburgh University Department of AI tech report 606, 1992.
This paper is temporarily (January 2003) inaccessible due to the Edinburgh fire. Since ‘temporary’ has lasted for over two years, here’s a draft version I still had the latex for. Compares Subsumption Architecture with Object-Oriented Design in the context of my MSc. Draft was last modified around November 1992, it was placed here March 2005.
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The Subsumption Strategy Development of a Music Modelling System
MSc Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Faculty of Science (Department of Artificial Intelligence), 1992.
For more information, see my page on the Reactive Accompanist (September 1992)
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