Artificial Intelligence

Key Areas:

The following are the main research areas in our group. There are many other areas of interest persued by individual researchers - please consult their respective home pages for more details.

Knowledge Acquisition: Knowledge Acquisition is concerned with the development of knowledge bases based on the expertise of a human expert. This requires to express knowledge in a formalism suitable for automatic interpretation. Within this field, research at UNSW focusses on incremental knowledge acquisition techniques, which allow a human expert to provide explanations of their decisions that are automatically integrated into sophisticated knowledge bases.

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge representation and reasoning deals with the formal aspects of representing and modelling problem domains and then reasoning with these representations. A key focus is the tradeoff between the expressiveness of the representation and the complexity of the associated reasoning algorithms.

Machine Learning: Machine learning is the computational approach to learning from data. Originating in artificial intelligence with the study of robot learning and models of natural learning, it has led to spin-offs like neural and evolutionary computation, data mining, learning theory and program synthesis. The techniques have been applied in just about every current data-intensive area of activity.

Robotics: Robotics deals with the practical application of many artificial intelligence techniques to solving real-world problems. This combines problems of sensing and modelling the world, planning and performing tasks, and interacting with human beings and other robots. Plus we get to play with some pretty neat toys, and call it research.

Computer Vision: Computer vision is to make useful decisions about real physical objects and scenes based on sensed images. It uses statistical methods to extract data using models based on geometry, physics and learning theory. Vision applications range from mobile robotics, industrial inspection and satellite image understanding, to human computer interaction, image retrieval from digital libraries, medical image analysis, proteomic image analysis and realistic rendering of synthetic scenes in computer graphics.

Linkages:

Various researchers in the AI group have partnerships with a number of other organisations, the following is a list of the main parties.

National ICT Australia: National ICT Australia (NICTA) is a large consortium aimed at tapping and developing Australia's ICT talent through world-class research, commercialisation, education, and industry collaboration. It plays a major role in the Australian Government's policy to promote science and innovation.

Center for Autonomous Systems: The ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems is a research center dealing with fusion of machines, computing, sensing, and software to create physically embodied intelligent systems capable of interacting with the complexities of the real world.

Smart Internet Technology CRC: The Smart Internet Technology CRC aims to develop new applications and services that exploit the convergence of telephone and data networks. UNSW's contribution is mainly in the area of personal assistant applications for mobile applications, adaptive multi-modal user interfaces, and wireless sensor networks.

iCinema: The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research brings together researchers and postgraduate students in new media, digital cinema, digital aesthetics, film theory, multimedia design, computer science, artificial intelligence and software/hardware engineering.