This laboratory focuses on those aspects of Artificial Intelligence that have to do with language, learning and cognition. The technologies we develop and deploy are broadly related to the School's research concentrations in:
The primary focus of the AI Lab is learning of language and ontology. A very interdisciplinary approach is taken that seeks to model and develop neurologically plausible psycholinguistic theories as well as engineering commercially viable interface technologies.
Robots, physical and simulated, play a major role in our attempts to learn a grounded syntax and semantics in which the computer/robot really understands what is being talked about. Both grammar and meaning are learned in an unsupervised way by learning patterns in context. The use of multimodal sensors, including touch, vision and sound, allows for a number of interesting enhancements of the way information is communicated to a computer. For example, combining camera and microphone input allows lip-reading to be used to enhance speech recognition under noisy conditions. In addition, this opens the door to the possibility of picking up additional expressional and emotional content, of tracking where a speaker is looking when talking, and conversely of synthesizing appropriate acoustic and facial expressions, and looking at the objects being talked about. This is a major focus of our Thinking Head project.
Biometric signals are another source of information, and can not only be used as inputs in their own right, but can be used to correlate with, and thus learn and validate, theories and models of language, learning and emotion. The signal processing and learning expertise developed for speech and language is also being applied to developing new techniques in biomedical signal processing, and in particular for the processing EEG in real world conditions. Our Brain Computer Interface project has two facets:
- allowing us to understand more of what is going on in a person's brain (including their emotional state and their level of skill acquisition or situation awareness), and
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allowing a person to control a computer or other devices such as a wheelchair.
This work is undertaken in collaboration with two other Flinders laboratories:
