Robotics

This talk was originally prepared for NI Raspberry Jam’s Kids Track, associated with the full Northern Ireland Developers Conference, held in lockdown and pre-recorded in the McKee Room in Farset Labs In Issac Asimov’s stories, the technical, social and personal impacts of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence are explored. One creation in his books was the career of “Robopsychologist”, a combination of mathematician, programmer, and psychologist, that diagnosed and treated misbehaving AI. In this talk we’ll discuss how on earth you can prepare for careers in Robopsychology and other careers that don’t exist (yet). ...

This is another short extract from the Thesis that I thought was particularly relevant given recent news coverage of the dangers of autonomy and AI, particularly in the field of “killer robots”. Legal Considerations in Design Trust If there is one key feature of the application of robotics and autonomy to the defence field that separates it from applications in commercial and civil fields, it is the potential direct impact on life and safety. ...

Biblio Sorbi, Toni, Dio De Capua, Rossi TERA, Genova Grade 1 What is this work about? Collaborative target tracking behaviours What are the main findings of this work? No surprise; two AUVs with a comms link are better at tracking, and that tracking is easier when the targets are stupid/random. What gap in our understanding does this work fill? Highlights MLO tracking operations, and provides insight into globally aware control systems ...

Biblio Carreras, Batlle, Ridao, and Roberts; An Overview on Behaviour based methods for AUV control, Girona, Spain What is this work about? A review and analysis of four AUV behaviour based reactionary control architectures, presenting four control architectures; Scheme, Subsumption, PDL, and Action Selection Dynamics, i.e. cooperative (schema, PDL) and competitive (Sub, ASD) What are the main findings of this work? Competitive models are often easier to design as only one behaviour is resident at a time, however this leads to ’jaunty’ and often sub-optimal results, as in this case where authors say the resultant pats for both competitive models are non-optimal ...

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ' I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection. I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’ ...

This is an approximate transcript from my July 2018 talk at Digital DNA’s AI NI Community Panel on wether the use of AI in defence and surveillence was inherently evil Yes, It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months because I completly forgot about it, sorrynotsorry Hello folks, I’m Andrew Bolster, most everyone calls me Bolster. And nobody calls me Doctor. I’m a Data Scientist at Alert Logic, a cyber security firm based Texas but with a research office in Weavers Court where we monitor, analyse and identify malicious and suspicious internet activity, protecting thousands of companies with advanced sequence and pattern matching sensors deployed across the world. ...