DEPARTMENT OF
COMPUTING SCIENCE
AND MATHEMATICS
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UNIVERSITY . COMPUTING SCIENCE . SEMINARS

SEMINARS - Spring 2010

[Talk Schedule] [Abstracts] [Previous Seminars]

The Department of Computing Science and Mathematics presents the following seminars. Unless otherwise stated, seminars will take place in Room 4B94 of the Cottrell Building, University of Stirling from 15.00 to 16.00 on Friday afternoons during semester time. For instructions on how to get to the University, please look at the following routes.

If you would like to give a seminar to the department in future or if you need more information, please contact the seminar organiser, Marwan Fayed, by

or sending email to email.png.)

Talk Schedule [Top] [Abstracts]

5th March
Professor Tariq S Durrani
Title
University of Strathclyde
[abstract]
12th March
Karla Parussel
Emotion as a Significant Change in Neural Activity
University of Stirling
[abstract]
19th March
Colin Black
Title: TBA
Tunstall Healthcare (UK) Ltd
[abstract]
26th March
Professor Chris Johnson
Title: TBA
University of Glasgow
[abstract]
16th April
Speaker: TBA
Title: TBA
-
23rd April
Michael Wheeler
Plastic Machines: Behavioural Diversity and the Turing Test
University of Stirling
[abstract]
30th April
Colin Perkins
Title: TBA
University of Glasgow
[abstract]
tba May
Mahesh Marina
Title: TBA
University of Edinburgh
[abstract]

5th March [Schedule]
Title
Professor Tariq S Durrani
University of Strathclyde
Body of abstract.
12th March [Schedule]
Emotion as a Significant Change in Neural Activity
Karla Parussel
University of Stirling
It is hypothesized here that two classes of emotions exist: driving and satisfying emotions. Driving emotions significantly increase the internal activity of the brain and result in the agent seeking to minimize its emotional state by performing actions that it would not otherwise do. Satisfying emotions decrease internal activity and encourage the agent to continue its current behavior to maintain its emotional state. It is theorized that neuromodulators act as simple yet high impact signals to either agitate or calm specific neural networks. This results in what we can define as either driving or satisfying emotions. The plausibility of this hypothesis has been tested using feed-forward networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons.
19th March [Schedule]
Title
Colin Black
Tunstall Healthcare (UK) Ltd.
Body of abstract.
26th March [Schedule]
Title
Professor Chris Johnson
University of Glasgow
Body of abstract.
16th April [Schedule]
Title
TBA
Institution
Body of abstract.
23th April [Schedule]
Plastic Machines: Behavioural Diversity and the Turing Test
Michael Wheeler
University of Stirling
After proposing the Turing Test, Alan Turing himself considered a number of objections to the idea that a machine might eventually pass it. One of the objections discussed by Turing was that no machine will ever pass the Turing Test because no machine will ever " have as much diversity of behaviour as a man ". He responded as follows: the " criticism that a machine cannot have much diversity of behaviour is just a way of saying that it cannot have much storage capacity" . I shall argue that the objection cannot be dismissed so easily. The diversity exhibited by human behaviour is characterized by a kind of context-sensitive adaptive plasticity. Most of the time, human beings flexibly and fluently respond to what is relevant in a given situation. Moreover, ordinary human life involves an open-ended flow of shifting contexts to which our behaviour typically adapts in real time. For a machine to " have as much diversity of behaviour as a man" would be for that machine to keep its responses and behaviour relevant within such a flow. Merely giving a machine the capacity to store a huge amount of information and an enormous number of behaviour-generating rules will not achieve this goal. By drawing on arguments presented originally by Descartes, and by making contact with the frame problem in artificial intelligence, I shall argue that the distinctive context-sensitive adaptive plasticity of human behaviour explains why the Turing Test is such a stringent test for the presence of thought, and why it is much harder to pass than Turing himself may have realized.
30th April [Schedule]
Title
Colin Perkins
University of Glasgow
Body of abstract.
xxth May [Schedule]
Title
Mahesh Marina
University of Edinburghr
Body of abstract.

Previous Seminar Series [Top] [Abstracts] [Schedule]

2009 - Spring Autumn
2008 - Spring Autumn
2007 - Spring Autumn
2006 - Spring Autumn
2005 - Spring Autumn
2004 - Spring Autumn
2003 - Spring Autumn

 


Last Modified: 18th February 2010