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From: "I. Dattani" <dattani@compsci.bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: SGES Evening Lecture- 29/01/97
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This talk is being given on Wednesday by Prof Aaron Sloman at the IEE.
Details below.

Ilesh.

***************************************************************************

SGES Evening Lecture
IEE - Faraday Room
Savoy Palce
London

Nearest Tube: Embankment and Waterloo
Date: 29 January 1997
Time: 6.30 pm

Chair: Dave Dutton (Building Research Establishment)

Speaker: Aaron Sloman
    School of Computer Science & Cognitive Science research Centre
    The University of Birmingham

Title:
    SIM_AGENT: A toolkit for exploring architectures for
    interacting intelligent agents.

Abstract:
    For our work exploring architectural design requirements for
    intelligent human-like agents, and other kinds, we need a facility
    for rapidly implementing and testing out different agent
    architectures, including agents that are composed of several
    different sorts of concurrent interacting sub-systems, in an
    environment where there are other agents and objects.

    For instance each agent could include perceptual mechanisms,
    motivational mechanisms, planning mechanisms, learning mechanisms,
    all coexisting, some of them reactive, some deliberative, and some
    reflective, some using symbolic processing and some using
    sub-symbolic mehanisms, such as neural nets.

    The SIM_AGENT toolkit, implemented in Pop-11, within the Poplog
    environment, was designed to support the exploration of such
    architectures in an interactive development environment with
    rapid prototyping facilities. It is now being used both at
    Birmingham and at DRA Malvern. Further information, including
    simple "mpeg" demonstration movies, is available at

        http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/cog_affect/sim_agent.html

    The talk will outline the motivation for the toolkit and
    describe its main features and limitations.


Biography:
    
Born in Southern Rhodesia 1936, went to school and university in Cape
Town (BSc mathematics and physics 1956 1st class), obtained a Rhodes
Scholarship and went to Oxford where philosophy (DPhil 1962) proved more
tempting than mathematics.

Started teaching Philosophy at Hull University in 1962, then moved
to Sussex in 1964. Spent 1972-3 in Edinburgh as Senior Visiting Fellow,
and was converted to "AI as the best way to do philosophy."

Returned to Sussex, and helped to found the Sussex School of Cognitive
and Computing Sciences. Dabbled in vision, the study of forms of
representation, motivation and emotion, architectures for complete
agents and managed the development of Poplog 1980-1991.

Elected fellow of American Association for AI in 1991, and also wanted a
change so moved to Birmingham. Foolishly agreed to be Head of school at
first, but since 1994 has been a research professor, working on
architectures for human-like agents, and related problems.

Wrote "The Computer Revolution in Philosophy" in 1978 and these days can
be found engaging in regular discussions on comp.ai.philosophy

***************************************************************************

********************************************
Ilesh Dattani
SSRC (Safety Systems Research Centre)
Bristol
England.

Tel: +44 (0)117 954-5160
Email: dattani@cs.bris.ac.uk

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dattani/
********************************************

        


