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Senior Lecturer, Murdoch University

I am head of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the School of Engineering and Information Technology.

I do research and teach in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics and human factors engineering. I’ve studied psychology, computer science and engineering for over thirty years. During this time I’ve designed and built many artificial intelligence programs and robots, including the BEELINE natural language understanding agent, a walking biped (Tarbaby), an innovative floor cleaning robot, a hexapod called Mascot, the CG-FGP system for computing with emotions and an experimental Programming by Demonstration learning program for eye-hand manipulation in robot workcell.

I teach the undergraduate Intelligent Systems and Human-Computer Interaction units, and the postgraduate Human Factors in IT unit.

I currently supervise PhD students on projects including an novel ’assigned responsibility’ approach for improved teleoperation of service robots, a new classification system for integrating web services and a experiment in generating natural language for an automated pyschotherapy agent.

I’m a Board member of the Mars Society Australia, a citizen-science body involved in engineering design, experimental research and fieldwork aimed at a future human exploration mission to Mars. This is a registered research body with the CSIRO, holds an annual research conference and organises expeditions to Marslike sites in outback Australia. It runs a number of technology development projects.

I serve as the manager of Project Marsupial, which is building a prototype pressurised vehicle for human use on the red planet.

Experience

  • –present
    Senior Lecturer, Murdoch University