UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
            COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

          "Grounding Task and Behaviour Structure in
                   Informational Constraints"

                        Sander van Dijk
    (Adaptive Systems Research Goup, School of Computer Science,
                University of Hertfordshire, UK)

                    26 January 2011  (Wednesday)
                      Meeting Room LD454 

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                            1 -2  pm


                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

When describing behaviour, often a hierarchical structure is used
with descriptions at different levels of abstraction: a dog is seen
digging, which is interpreted as part of a more abstract 'food finding'
behaviour, which again can be seen as contributing to a higher level
'survival' behaviour. An important question is whether such descriptions
correlate to the actual behaviour generating system that underlies this
behaviour. In ethology, a discussion has continued throughout the last
decades whether these are mere human biased projections, or actually
necessary structures. In artificial intelligence, roughly in this same
timespan it has been shown that they can be over-complicated descriptions
and that single-level assemblies can be sufficient to generate certain
behaviour, but also that in some cases equipping an artificial agent
with hierarchical behaviour generation architectures enhances its
learning performance.

In my research I aim to progress the understanding of why such
hierarchical descriptions are attractive, why they work, and whether
they are necessary. Starting from the argument that behaviour
generation is constrained by a range of limits on information
acquisition and processing, I show how such limits spontaneously give
rise to abstraction and structuring of tasks and behaviour generation,
and thereby suggest that hierarchical structuring is a natural way of
coping with informational constraints.

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq