We are from the Artificial Intelligence Research Group in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (phew!).

The RoboCup project is being done as an undergraduate thesis project by the two main members - Mike Lawther and John Dalgliesh. We are both final year students in Computer Engineering. This is an undeniably cool project - we get to work with cutting edge hardware, and write cutting edge software.

When Sony put out a call for proposals, we suggested the idea to our supervisor, Professor Claude Sammut, who is Head of the AI Group. A proposal was written, and subsequently chosen as one of the six successful ones from a field of twenty-four. Claude also provided the financial support that a project like this needs - especially since we had to travel to Sweden!

Another invaluable member is Phil Preston. Phil has the uncanny ability to organise things, and he did all of the planning of the trip - plane tickets, hotels etc. When at the competition, he made sure John and Mike managed to do the more mundane things associated with living - such as eating and sleeping every now and then.

There was further academic support from our thesis assessor - Dr Graham Mann. Graham was our liason with corporate Sony throughout the project, leaving Mike and John free to deal with the Sony technical people.



johndalgliesh

  • Position at UNSW : 4th year Computer Engineering student
  • Position on team : Coach
  • Special Skills : Code hacking, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence
  • email : johnd @ cse.unsw.edu.au
  • HomePage : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~johnd

mikelawther

  • Position at UNSW : 4th year Computer Engineering student
  • Position on team : Coach
  • Special Skills : Strategy, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence
  • email : mikel @ cse.unsw.edu.au
  • HomePage : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~mikel

philpreston

  • Position at UNSW : Phd Student
  • Position on team : Physio
  • Special Skills : Hardware, Organising Things(tm)
  • email : philp @ cse.unsw.edu.au
  • HomePage : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~philp

claudesammut

  • Position at UNSW : Head of Artificial Intelligence
  • Position on team : Supervisor / Manager
  • Special Skills : Machine Learning, Logic Programming, Knowledge Based Systems
  • email : claude @ cse.unsw.edu.au
  • HomePage : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~claude

grahammann

  • Position at UNSW : Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence
  • Position on team : Assessor / Manager
  • Special Skills : anything futuristic, high-tech or scientifically amazing
  • email : mann @ cse.unsw.edu.au
  • HomePage : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~mann

jamiewestendorp

waleedkadous

  • Position at UNSW : Phd Student, Associate Lecturer
  • Position on team : Research Support
  • Special Skills : Temporal Machine Learning, Graphics, Apologising (sorry!)
  • email : waleed @ cse.unsw.edu.au
  • HomePage : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~waleed

malcolmryan

  • Position at UNSW : Phd. Student
  • Position on team : Research Support
  • Special Skills : Reinforcement Learning for Robotics
  • email : malcolmr @ cse.unsw.edu.au
  • HomePage : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~malcolmr

This picture is of most of the team in one place at one time.
(l-r) Mike (with dog), Graham, Phil, Malcolm, Waleed & John (with dog). Missing are Claude and Jamie.

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