Connectionists: GRAships - neuroevolution for agent control

[Bobby D. Bryant]

I have two Graduate Research Assistantships in the Department of  
Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, for  
work using neuroevolution to create "brains" for autonomous intelligent  
agents that operate in the rich environments of videogames and computer  
simulators.

The GRAs will pursue methods, applications, analysis, or theory in that  
area.  Opponent modelling and policy induction from human-generated  
examples are of particular interest.


My colleague Sushil Louis has an additional GRAship in his Evolutionary  
Computation Systems Laboratory.  This GRA will pursue similar topics,  
though not necessarily with ANNs.


Students who come to UNR will also have the opportunity to interact  
with other professors and students who research computational  
intelligence methods for human-computer interaction, robotics, vision,  
and security.  We are currently bootstrapping additional  
interdisciplinary research programs with our colleagues in software  
engineering, for the role of CI methods in game engine design, and in  
psychology, for formal analysis of the behavior of autonomous  
intelligent agents in rich environments.


Application instructions for our graduate program can be found at  
http://www.unr.edu/content/programs/gradprograms.asp

The application deadline for the fall semester is April 15.  If you  
wish to be considered for the university's fellowship competition,  
please apply by March 15.  Either way, drop me a line when you have  
submitted your application so I will know to expect it.


For background on the methods I have been using for agent control, see
the papers available at http://www.cse.unr.edu/~bdbryant/

For more information about the work in Dr. Louis's ECSL, see  
http://ecsl.cse.unr.edu/

For the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, see  
http://www.cse.unr.edu/

For the University of Nevada at Reno, http://www.unr.edu/

-- 
Bobby Bryant
Computational Intelligence / Computer Game Engineering
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Nevada, Reno