This site is as
much of a personal resource for me as it is a means of dissemination of
what I am doing/thinking about, but you are still welcome to browse, and
very welcome to give feedback via the Contact Us
page.
I am studying for
my PhD at University of Reading in the School of Systems
Engineering. I did my first degree (well, the first one I completed -
there had been others) in Intelligent Systems in the Cybernetics
department. My second degree is in Applied Informatics
(Bio-informatics).
I rather hope to
continue getting degrees from here-on in. The chance to get
involved in academic dialogue, see and discover commonalities and think
deeply on the nature of the universe is compelling. Plus, you get
pretty letters after your name!
Please note - these pages are far from complete, and will be
developed over the next two years or so.
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Why a static
website?
Why not a wiki or blog?
Well, frankly, a blog needs regular updates to make sense of
the technology (at least, in my opinion - if you don't update regularly,
people will prune your rss feed from their lists, and then they will
never know you have updated), and a wiki has the problem of people making
changes I might disagree with, which then need to be rolled back and it
all gets messy.
Ideally, I would be publishing this to a static website from
my MeAggregator. That would give you, dear reader, the advantage
that I would include more stuff written by other people - the reason it
isn't included at the moment is due to the consequent need to reference
it, and, to be honest, read it in the first place. If I could
aggregate properly (ie in a MeAggregator way) I could easily handle the
first oart, and quite probably delegate some of the reading bit to
various colleagues who I trust to tag things sensibly!
Anyway - if you have comments on any of the material on
these pages, you can contact me via the Contact
Us page, and I will include your comments.
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Initially...
My original research, PhD-wise, was into bio-acoustic
species recognition using neural networks as pattern recognisers.
Prior to that I had applied to study either the possibility of
consciousness as an emergent property of interacting agents, or
contextual search. I am combining both of these to some extent, and
whilst I don't expect to come out with a conscious computer in the next
two years (more's the pity!) nor a wonderous search engine which seems to
understand the heart of what you meant when you asked it the question, I
am rather hoping that the work I do do will be heavily informed by the
models I have in my mind as a result of having thought about these
problems before.
Sometimes I suspect that far from being a few steps away
from conscious computers, we are using computers less consciously.
As we become more familiar with them, we notice them less, and pay less
attention to what we do with them. 'Ware the advent of subconscious
computing!
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