Creaturesmarts the Art and Architecture of a Virtual Brain

Robert Burke
MIT Media Lab
Synthetic Characters Group

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new weblog and homepage

Greetings!  From 1999 through 2001, I was a Research Banana and Primary'due south Pupil in Bruce Blumberg's Synthetic Characters group at the MIT Media Lab.  Here is a link to my new abode page and blog.

This page hasn't been updated much since 2001, although I accept included links to publications below.  Cheers to the kindness of the Media Lab's tech folks, I can still exist reached at my MIT Media Lab electronic mail address.

Drama of all sorts: a thesis...
Hither is a copy of my Master's Thesis.

...presentations about Synthetic Characters...
I presented "Fauna Smarts: The Art and Architecture of a Virtual Brain'' with Damian Isla at the 2001 Game Developer's Briefing; here are the proceedings (pdf). They represent an overview of our group's recent inquiry, and include all the technical item in our contempo AAAI paper (pdf).  Here are the the slides (zipped ppt) from a talk I gave at the Technical University of British Columbia in February.

... and Goatzilla?
Hither is a short video clip (YouTube, WMV, QuickTime) I put together for the 2001 Jump consortium meeting to demonstrate several aspects of my thesis research: drive-based action option using ActionTuples; fourth dimension/rate learning inspired by Gallistel's models; planning facilitated by ActionTuple generation; and many new learning visualizers.

In the clip, captured entirely from our behavior system, goatzilla is performing actions that he has discovered satisfy his various drives: hunger, pain avoidance, the desire to dominate other creatures, and then on.  When the "mouse pointer of Fate" comes in and cranks up his hunger drive, goatzilla is stymied.  He'd similar to eat sheep and in that location aren't whatever left.  But his time/rate learning mechanism has taught him that kicking the shed reliably leads to the appearance of sheep. And so he kicks the shed anticipating the sheep, out they come, there's a feeding frenzy, and goatzilla rejoices.

I didn't await goatzilla to invade my enquiry, but goatzilla does not ask permission.  (His deepest secret, of course, is that he's simply a big dog.)  The Goatzilla video home folio is here.

At the MediaLabEurope opening in Ireland, the grouping presented sheep|dog: Trial By Eire, which showcased our new system, learning mechanisms, the audio-visual pattern matching, and more.  Scott Eaton has put together a absurd sheep|dog website. Nosotros showed sheep|dog at this yr'south E3 in Los Angeles.

With Scott, Dan, and the help of the unabridged Synthetic Characters group, we built Rufus 2, a robotic dog caput that is controlled by our behaviour and motor systems.  Rufus has a camera mounted in his correct centre, an infrared sensor in his left center, and a microphone for doing acoustic blueprint matching.  He has eight degrees of freedom and a voicebox, and you lot can railroad train him, for example, to stop barking at his true cat.  Take a look at him and detect out more by clicking hither.

In March of 2000 we finished work on The Isle of Homo's Best Friend, a demo released at the Estimator Game Developers Briefing 2000.  In the process of designing it, nosotros rebuilt the entire codebase from scratch.  The new organization (which has since become known as c1) represented a big footstep frontward for just about every office of the codebase.  Click the image of the isle, or here, for more images from the demo.

Last year, Yuri Ivanov and I wrote dogEar, an acoustic blueprint matcher for Sydney M-nine.0, our first installation for the Synthetic Characters "Yr of the Dog."  (Duncan, Goatzilla and the wolves use it now.)

The final major project I worked on before beginning work at the Media Lab was The Legend of the Greasepole, an interactive experience that showcased a display of teamwork amongst almost 100 democratic characters.  The notion of a Greasepole is going to require some explanation, and so please visit the site to find out more.

Classes
Here are two of my essays from Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind form, which I took in Spring 2000.  The first, Learning the Hard Way, draws on negative learning ideas from The Society of Listen, and Doug Lenat'due south piece of work on knowledge classification.  The second, Time, For a Change, considers how the passage of time might affect our creatures.

After Minsky's Society of Mind and Rodney Brooks' Embodied Intelligence, I took Whitman Richards' Perception and Cognition course, and Laura Harrington's playwriting class.   My thesis was influenced by all of these -- and the courses that came before.

The Norwegian Connexion
I spent the summer of 1999 in Tromsø, a Norwegian town of 50,000 people some seventy degrees north of the equator.  I returned for New year's day's 2000, and the thought of visiting once more makes me pino for the fjords.

I kept an online diary that'due south full of digital pictures taken with a Nikon Coolpix 900.  There are a couple of pages I'd say are worth looking at.  The first is of the twenty-four hours we climbed Tromsdaltinden, the mountain pictured to the left.  Some other is the Lofoten Island series.  Finally, my trip through Scandinavia by railroad train (with stops in Bodø, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Amsterdam).

The rest of the online diary I kept is thorough, if not occasionally cute.  My login name, solan, is the proper noun of a Norwegian bird.  (If y'all knew this already, drop me an east-post, 5�re se snill!)

Pure, Unmitigated... Stuff
Hither are some pictures of my family unit - my folks, my sisters Elizabeth (on right) and Caleigh (on left) (and over again, the two of them), and Meghan (the furry ane with all the energy)  Here's a big fish.  Here are sheep.  Hither are very early incarnations of our sheep doing the imperial jig (and me attempting a simulated highland accent).  Here's something about dogs in elk which apparently is truthful. Hither are some friends from Canada slamming their jackets around with me outside the Media Lab.  Here's my former officemate Song Yee in a Queen's Academy tam.  Here's a particle system in progress.  Here'due south dear Jessica, born and raised in New Zealand.  Goatzilla says, "honey meeeeeee!"  And this is me (dreadfully fisheyed) from Rufus' dog's eye view.  Hither's Duncan H. Terrier after a few pints.  Hither's Damian beside our terminal crisis-time smorgasborg.  And hither's a play I in one case wrote about some stuff. This is what the Destinasjon Tromsø web-cam suggested Kingdom of norway looked similar the other solar day.  And non only is this the view out the window of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, simply this (and these mountains) and are only minutes away from there.

Contacting Me
Sending me email by clicking here is probably the fastest way to get in affect.

Characters-Related Publications (rev. Feb/02)
R. Burke, B. Blumberg. "Using Apparent Temporal Causality for Learning in Synthetic Creatures." In the Proceedings of the International Articulation Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Bologna, Italy. To Appear July 2002. (pdf available before long)

R. Shush. It'due south almost Fourth dimension: Temporal Representations for Synthetic Characters. (M.S. Thesis.) Rev. September 2001 (pdf)

D. Isla, R. Burke, et.al. "A Layered Brain Architecture for Synthetic Characters," in the Proceedings of the International Articulation Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp.1051-1058, Seattle, WA, Baronial 2001. (pdf)

R. Burke, D. Isla, M. Downie, Y. Ivanov and B. Blumberg. "Creature Smarts: The Fine art and Compages of a Virtual Brain." In the Proceedings of the Game Developers Conference, pp. 147-166, San Jose, CA, 2001. (pdf)

S.-Y. Yoon, R. C. Shush, B. G. Blumberg, G. E. Schneider. "Interactive Training for Synthetic Characters," in the Proceedings of AAAI 2000. (pdf) (ps)

juliandeparose.blogspot.com

Source: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/

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