ABOUT 'ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE'

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BIOGRAPHIES

Satinder P. Gill
Associate Editor of ‘Artificial Intelligence & Society’
<www.gvu.gatech.edu/people/sha.xinwei/topologicalmedia/people.html>
<www-csli.stanford.edu/~sgill/>

Satinder did her PhD in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge (UK) on “Dialogue and Tacit Knowledge for Knowledge Transfer”, after which she worked for NTT Communications Science Research Labs and ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research Labs) in Japan. Her research findings and PhD foundations took her to Finland’s CKIR (Centre for Knowledge and Innovation Research) and CSLI (Media X) Stanford in the USA, where she explored the nature of collocated and distributed communication. She is currently collaborating with the Topological Media Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) extending her theory of Body Moves and work on gesture, to the choreography of responsive media environments. She is also collaborating with the Centre for Music and Science at Cambridge (UK) on the relation between body rhythms, intersubjectivity, interaction, and cognition. Her research is about understanding knowledge formation and transformation in human communication, and the role of the body and the nature of tacit knowledge within this. In so doing, she is reflecting on a transdisciplinary concept of Interface. Throughout her research life she has been Associate Editor of the AI & Society Journal, motivated by the desire to support discussions and practical work that addresses technology’s role in society, at the philosophical, ethical, political, developmental, and aesthetic levels. She is currently writing on Knowledge Transformation and is co-editing a forthcoming book on Gesture and Tacit Knowledge for the CSLI (Stanford) Cognitive Science Series.

Joanna Bryson
University of Bath
<www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/index.html>

Joanna obtained a BA in Behavioural Science from Chicago, then took a Masters from the Edinburgh Department of AI. She has worked in robotics and cognitive modelling with Edinburgh’s Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience and Intelligence Systems and holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, where she worked in the AI lab. She is a an Associate Editor of Adaptive Behaviour, and on the Editorial Board of Web Intelligence and Agent Systems. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Bath where she founded the Artificial models of natural Intelligence group (AmonI), and where she is also a member of the Centre for Bio-Mimetics and the Centre for Mathematical Biology. She is a member of the EPSRC Biological Robotics Network and a Scientific Adviser for Communicative Machines, Inc.. Her scientific passion is understanding human and other animal behaviour. She uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to build working hypotheses (or models) of intelligence, which she then tests by comparing their predictions (or behavior) to that of real animals. She believes that understanding AI and animal behaviour will greatly advance our understanding of humans. She is currently working primarily on applying her AI development methodology, Behaviour Oriented Design (BOD) to modelling non-human primates. Among her numerous robotics projects, she has developed an AI music system called The Reactive Accompanist, and worked on the humanoid robot project (Cog) which was designed to simulate the staged development of human infants.

Owen Holland
University of Essex
<cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/owen/>
Owen, who originally took a degree in psychology in 1969, has had a very diverse and interdisciplinary career. He has held faculty positions in psychology, electronics engineering, and computer science, and has worked in the UK (Edinburgh, UWE, Essex, CyberLife Research Institute), Germany (Zentrum fur interdisziplinare Forschung, Bielefeld), Belgium (Starlab), and the USA (California Institute of Technology). He has also worked in industry, in telecommunications and precision metrology, and has consulted for major companies and multinationals. The subjects of his research have included collective robotics, swarm intelligence software, the first robotic predator (SlugBot), and the history of British cybernetics. (Pop next door to the Science Museum and see Grey Walter's historic tortoise robot from 1950, which Owen rediscovered in 1995). For the last few years he has been involved in the development of the new field of machine consciousness (see <www.machineconsciousness.org>), and he currently holds the first major grant to investigate the subject.

Dr. Richard Barbrook
Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster
<www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk>

Dr. Richard Barbrook was educated at Cambridge, Essex and Kent universities. During the early-1980s, he was involved in pirate and community radio broadcasting. He helped to set up Spectrum Radio, a multi-lingual station operating in London, and published extensively on radio issues. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, Richard worked for a research institute at the University of Westminster on media regulation within the EU. Some of this research was later published in 'Media Freedom: the contradictions of communications in the age of modernity' (Pluto Press, London 1995). Since the mid-1990s, Richard has been coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and is course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies. In collaboration with Andy Cameron, he wrote 'The Californian Ideology' which was a pioneering critique of the neo-liberal politics of 'Wired' magazine. In the last few years, Richard has written a series of articles exploring the impact of the sharing of information over the Net, including ‘The Hi-Tech Gift Economy’ and ‘Cyber-communism’. He is presently working on a book - ‘Imaginary Futures’ – which is about how ideas from the 1960s and 1970s shape our contemporary conception of the information society. A selection of Richard’s writings are available on the Hypermedia Research Centre's website: <www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk>.