海角直播

海角直播 lecturer awarded special grant for research

Senior lecturer in interactive systems, Dr Peter Gregory has been awarded a prestigious research grant to carry out work in the area of numeric domain model acquisition.

Dr Gregory was awarded with the grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the UK鈥檚 main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. The EPSRC supports the next generation of technological change in the UK. The successful proposal is entitled 鈥淣umeric Domain Model Acquisition from Action Traces鈥� and will focus on domain model acquisition, or automated modelling - the problem of allowing a computer to learn its own world model by observing actions.

Computational learning of observable moves can be likened to a human observer unfamiliar with the game of chess - by watching a game and the sequences of moves taken in the game, the observer can learn a lot about the rules. Watching a bishop for long enough for example would demonstrate that only diagonal moves are possible for this piece.

Dr Gregory will study how computers learn in this way and will develop new methods of numerical automated modelling. Many industrial and commercial applications use automated modelling to solve common problems such as automated planning, general game playing, interactive narrative production or workplace rostering.

Completion of the project will allow many different problems to be learnt simply from observation. Examples may include models to determine capacity limits for certain resources, or constraints for positioning items. Modelling may also be created to enable certain actions within a social network based on levels of observed friendship.

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