Research

EUROPA Project

The EUROPA project (European Robotic Pedestrian Assistant) aims to produce a robot capable of solving spatial tasks assigned by pedestrians within an urban environment. Such tasks include conversing with the user to establish the identity of an object or location, escorting the user to said destinations, providing directions or semantic descriptions of locations, and responding to imperative instructions such as “take the first left”. Behind the scenes, the robot will gradually accumulate spatial and semantic data with regards to its surroundings via a number of sources. The system will employ a spoken dialogue system to provide the most natural possible interface to the user.

My particular role in this project is the spoken language interaction between user and robot, modelling spatial cognition, and world knowledge representation; that is, representing objects by their semantic and spatial topological properties.

I am currently developing a new language called HURDLE (HUman Robot DiaLogue Engine) which is purpose built for specifying dialogue behaviour in general, and as is a mixture of Prolog, Haskell and more conventional programming languages. Details to come soon.

Teaching

  • Supervision: Imperative Programming II Practicals, TT 2009.
  • Supervision: Computational Linguistics Practicals, MT 2009.
  • Class Marking: Computational Linguistics, MT 2009.
  • Class Tutor: Computational Linguistics, MT 2009.

Undergraduate Work

  • Automated Marking of Exam Papers using Semantic Parsing: My 4th year dissertation. I used machine learning techniques and a natural language parser to attempt to mark textual Biology GCSE questions, using data kindly supplied by the OCR Exam Board. I also developed a new form of machine learning classifier called a 'compound classifier' which used clustering. The dissertation received the Microsoft Research Prize for Best Undergraduate Dissertation.
  • Circuit Modeller (doc format): My 3rd year dissertation. I developed a piece of software to design and simulate logic-level circuits, from simple circuits to a basic MIPS architecture. The circuit could also be automatically generated in CSP code, a concurrent modelling language.