Come to Birmingham as
students
or as
researchers
to help us investigate, model and design information processing
systems: in computers, in brains, in minds, in evolution, in
science, and in society -- to build as challenges, to entertain,
to help make the world a better place, and to help us understand
what we (humans) are.
Directions for finding us.
Why do UK government ministers,
most recently the
Armed Forces Minister Bill Rammell
(but often the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown) respond to criticisms
of their policies, whether in education, health or military matters,
by boasting about how much money they have spent in the last N
years? Do they really not have any understanding of the differences
between the role of money and the role of deep analysis of problems
combined with careful research and experiment to find good solutions? (Merely
trying to find out what voters want does not provide information
about how to achieve what they want.) Insofar as many of those
ministers have university degrees, I suppose that is just another
manifestation of the inadequacies of the educational policies of
previous governments, alongside the inadequacies of the processes of
selection of ministers?
Why don't people who preach and teach suicide bombing lead by
example?
Since much of my stuff is disorganised it may be easiest to find
things using Google. Search either the school site or the world.
(Thanks to Dave Parker for help.)
EMAIL:
I have no clerical help, am swamped with email and am very
disorganised. So I often plan to respond 'later' to a message, but
never get around to it. If you think I haver forgotten to reply to a
message you sent me, feel free to send a reminder.
WHAT'S MORE BLAMEWORTHY IN AN OLYMPIC ATHLETE:
(a) trying to get help from drugs (as some do secretly)?
(b) trying
to get help from their gods (as many do openly)?
And why?
(Learn about
analytical atheism.)
SOME USEFUL ACADEMIC/RESEARCH LINKS (25 Aug 2008)
ON CRUEL AND UNFAIR REWARD-BASED GOVERNMENT (30 Apr 2008)
NO TIME FOR ANYTHING BUT FREELY AND QUICKLY AVAILABLE LITERATURE
WHY DO WINDOWS USERS PUT UP WITH IT?:
(I'll later move this rant into a separate file.)
How many times have you seen a powerpoint user have to temporarily
minimise powerpoint in order to open up something else during a
presentation? I cannot understand how all those users (even
Professors of Computer Science) have allowed Microsoft to go on
providing a system that does not support multiple virtual desktops -
which I used for several years on Suns running Solaris, from about
1990, and have been using since 1999 on Linux, both on my desktop PC
and on
laptops. I used to use six virtual desktops at
a time. Then for a few years I switched to eight. Now I regularly
have ten (in all cases using the
CTWM window manager
-- currently Version 8a). Moreover, I don't have to fiddle about
with a mouse in order to switch between them (Ctwm allows me to to
cycle through them in a fraction of a second using the keyboard --
though I can use the mouse, which is a bit slower). So when I need
to give a presentation I leave the workspaces dedicated to my long
term current tasks (e.g. browser open with frequently accessed web
sites, editor instantiations for papers I am working on, PDF reader
instances with papers I am currently reading) and set up my
presentation (prepared using latex and shown using xdvi or xpdf),
and in other desktops set up other things I want to show, e.g.
videos, software demos, images. Then during my talk I can flip to
the required workspace and instantly run whatever I have set up, and
then instantly return. My wife has to use windows, because she uses
the wonderful orienteering map-making package,
OCAD.
But watching all the hassle she has to go through because of the
crummy user interface MSWindows inflicts on her is very sad. She
can't even push most of a window temporarily upwards off the screen
leaving just the bit she wants to see exposed while she does some
work in another window. And she can't type into a small part of a
partly covered window without making that window come up and cover
everything else. I've had these options on Sun workstations and
Linux machines for years. (Input focus follows mouse without raising
the window automatically. That should at least be an option on any
sensible system.)
Other things that make me hate having to use MSWindows to help my
wife: panels that come up showing a tiny unexpandable
window into a large file or large list of options so that you have
to waste time scrolling -- as if we still used 800x600 screens.
On linux/unix, all such panels (that I encounter) are stretchable,
except those produced by foolish web site designers. (Maybe some of
these problems on windows are the fault of application providers.
Does microsoft make it easy for them to use stretchable as well as
scrollable text panels?)
Another stupidity is that when shown directory listings there
appears to be no way to filter what is shown by pattern as in
ls *smith*.txt
in unix/linux, and various other operating systems, which we have
been able to do since long before Windows was even invented.
However, I have noticed that the Linux developers who try to make
Linux look and behave like Windows, in the interests of winning
converts often fail to use the power of the Unix mechanisms in
Linux. E.g. as far as I know, the standard graphical file browsers
in Linux (e.g. nautilus, pcmanfm) go slightly beyond windows
explorer in allowing pattern matching on the first character of a
file or directory name, but do not allow wild cards, e.g. 'a*.p' to
get all files starting with 'a' and ending '.p'. I find that
exclusion daft, given the powerful regular expression matchers
available in Linux. I used that in my 'toy' pop11 based file browser
as long ago as 1999.
http://www.poplog.org/talk/1999/msg00165.html
Another thing I have been using very fruitfully for many years on
unix (since the 1980s) but is still not available in Windows
versions prior to Vista, and apparently only in a restricted form in
Vista (??) is symbolic links. This wonderful invention allows a unix
directories to share subdirectories, and has many powerful uses. For
Windows users who have no idea what I am talking about look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link.
Shortcuts are a poor substitute, for the reasons given there.
A few more things that Unix got right by about 1975 and DOS and
Windows failed to use, causing quite unnecessary mal-designs and
years of confusion:
On unix, as on earlier systems, the Control key was close to the
little finger, i.e. next to the "A" key, and the CapsLock key, when
that became available, was down at the bottom, rightly because for
many people it was used a lot less often, and more importantly, did
not need to be held down at the same time as other keys. I suspect
the position of the windows Control Key at the bottom of the column
causing the wrist to have to be contorted for many combinations,
e.g. Control+W, Control+Q, control+A is responsible for much
repetitive strain injury.
Not distinguishing devices from directories in file name syntax was
a brilliant idea which I first encountered in Unix in the mid 1970s.
So the fact that this directory tree starts off on a magnetic drive
/places/towns/cities
and then is later move to a different device (e.g. a USB drive, or
to a subdirectory of another directory)
/things/places/towns/cities
does not affect the syntax required for the name 'places' on a unix
(and now also linux or Mac) file structure allows many things to be
done elegantly. Even the terminal can be treated as a file /dev/tty
and processes reading from and writing to any device can be
conceptualised as reading from and writing to a file, so that the
symbols '>' and '<' for writing to and reading from have a suitably
general interpretation. Where a non-linear mode of access is
required, that can be handled by software used, not the syntax of
the path name.
And then there was the totally unnecessary decision to use '\' as
separator in path names in DOS and Windows, where '/' (a much older
character in pre-computer usage) had been used previously. Why do
people who are supposed to be clever do these things? The backslash
was originally introduced to allow computers to represent things
like '/\' and '\/' as complex symbols. Later backslash was used in
the C programming language and Unix as an character used to
transform the interpretation of the following character, e.g.
putting \ before an apostrophe to prevent it being interpreted as
the end of a string, or before itself, as in \\ to stop it being
interpreted as an escape character. Then along came Microsoft, and
IBM's failure to understand what they were doing.
I could go on, and on, ....
For some hunches about what Microsoft may be doing see the last
section of
this
file.
NOTE ON FORMATTING:
Adjust the width of your browser window to make the lines the length you
prefer. I do not presume to dictate line lengths for readers of what I
write, as so many web site designers do (including the BBC's). Feel free
to adjust font size also. Write and complain to web site designers who
tell you what resolution they have designed for and which browser they
want you to use. Tell them they should follow standards, e.g. http://www.w3.org/, not vendors or
hardware preferences. Join the fight to to abolish frames: they
interfere with use of bookmarks and 'back' buttons.
Last Updated: 24 Sep 2009
My email address is "A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk".
Please, where possible, send me email rather than paper.
Paper wastes my time and usually gets lost in piles of
other papers (I have no secretarial assistance).
PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME HTML EMAIL: SEND PLAIN TEXT ONLY.
Find out how to fix your mailer settings.
Instead of sending me an unsolicited document as an attachment,
please, if possible,
merely send me a URL that specifies where I can fetch the document ---
if I want to. (This does not apply to requested attachments,
e.g. in applications or submissions.)
I have no funds for Summer internships. Sorry.
PLEASE do not send me marketing email of any kind. If I want to
buy equipment, software, medicines, holidays, gadgets, etc. I
know how to find out what is available. If YOU were sent
email by everyone who thought you might be interested in
what they sell, you would be swamped and annoyed.
Don't do it to others. I should not have to take an
'unsubscribe' action to stop you harrassing me.
Made Fellow of
WIF
in
2004??
(Not sure what that implies, or why I was chosen.
Note added 2007: Asking a question about whether the WIF
is a hoax in my 'Short CV'
resulted in my being informed that I am no
longer a Fellow. That was later rescinded.)
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Birmingham, B15 2TT
England, UK (Use email not paper please.)
1991-2005: Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science
Since 2005: Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive
Science. (I.e. retired, but working full time.)
Honorary
DSc, University of Sussex, 2006 with
funny
hat.
EMAIL address is above,
with a warning about use of it.
WWW: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
Phone numbers:
Office: +44-121-414-4775
Fax: +44-121-414-4281
NOTE: There is no need to address me as "Professor".
"Aaron" will do.
If you send me Microsoft files, e.g.
Word or Powerpoint files I shall read them only using
OpenOffice a freely
available, open source, multi-platform package which I use on linux
and unix platforms. So before sending please ensure that your file
works in OpenOffice. You have no right to expect me to spend money
and time to buy and use software just to read your documents. At
least OpenOffice is free and runs on windows and other
operating systems, so you can easily use it to produce documents
that are readable on many more platforms. I use only
unix/linux
systems on my desktop and laptop
computers, and free software for my work. PCs running
windows do not allow me to work as I wish. One of several reasons is
explained here.
When scientists discuss experimental observations,
they often, unfortunately, use language that evolved for informal
discourse among people engaged in every day social interaction, like
this:
Instead we should understand that we are talking about a complex system
with many concurrently active parts that work together more or less
harmoniously most of the time but can sometimes come into conflict.
These parts are organised in an information-processing architecture
that maps onto brain mechanisms in complex, indirect ways that are not
well understood.
So we should ask questions like this if we wish to do
deep science:
CONJECTURE
SOME PRELIMINARIES AND PERMISSIONS
PERMISSION
Anyone in the universe has my permission to use freely any information
about me on this web site or any web site created by me (subject to
obvious restrictions regarding identity theft and use of information for
criminal purposes). There are some universities in the UK that have
apparently been advised by lawyers (who make their living by trying to
prevent themselves from being sued for giving less than totally
pessimistic advice?) that if they don't get written permission to do
what everyone around the world is already doing freely they may get into
legal difficulties. So we all end up wasting yet more time asking and
giving permission, on paper even in the 21st century, whilst
universities elsewhere in the world just get on with the job instead.
Because administrators in UK Universities do not understand risk
management there is now a huge amount of waste caused by giving undue
weight to over-cautions recommendations of people who do not understand
requirements for doing excellent teaching and research, but do know how
to read legal documents in the most pessimistic possible way.
Is anyone costing all the waste of tax-payers' money that results
from all these pessimistic legalistic restrictive practices?
There has been public criticism of the waste caused by risk-averse
schools,
but for some reason nobody has criticised universities for making the
same mistakes, like installing
a highly secure wireless network service
that many staff and students cannot access, on the basis of advice
from auditors.
DISCLAIMER
This is a personal document
and should not be assumed to reflect the views of
The University of Birmingham
or
The School of Computer Science
though of course there is considerable overlap, especially with the
latter. I am glad to be in a university that respects academic freedom.
NOTE:
I have tried to make this file
viewable with as
many browsers as possible. including
LYNX
and
LINKS
two plain text
browsers, in addition to
firefox, and
mozilla, though I have not had time
to test others.
Please do the same with your web pages. I am very grateful to
http://www.w3.org/ for their
validity checker.
I found a web page commenting on the quirky style of a
presentation I gave in 2002, so wrote a little response
here,
explaining why I do what I do and why I don't like flashy gimmicky
presentations.
I discovered, through searching google for references to
'polyflaps' that
our work on polyflaps
is being used to help sell educational toys:
here
and here.
(Search for 'polyflaps' in those web pages.)
Letter to Lynne Jones MP about Government proposals for top-up fees
My local MP Lynne Jones
(who has close links with the University of Birmingham, including a
BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD) has consistently opposed the Government
proposal to allow universities to charge top-up fees, as well as
opposing other misguided policies and the war on Iraq.
In January 2004 I wrote a letter expressing support for her objections
to top-up fees, arguing that the proposal is a botched stealth tax to
help fund some universities and not others, and should instead be
replaced by a coherent comprehensive policy on higher education. The
letter is available, in PDF format, here
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/gov/ with comments
received from people who have read it.
18 Mar 2004:
Comment on University action regarding web-sites
I was Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, but am
now formally retired, though still doing full time research while
tolerated by my School.
In accordance with UK academic practice my job ended in September
2002, i.e. at the end of the academic year in which
I turned 65. However I was re-employed on a temporary
nominal contract which ended in September 2005, while I
continued to work full time mainly as a researcher,
helping with some management and a little teaching.
My original appointment here in 1991
was primarily a research appointment, though I helped
with teaching related to the development of new undergraduate and
postgraduate degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science,
including helping to plan the new undergraduate degrees combining AI
with Psychology, Mathematics, Computer Science, or Arts subjects.
I formally retired as an employee of the university in September 2005,
but continue to do research almost full time, helping my department with
occasional undergraduate lectures and some admin.
An overview of some of my main research interests can be found
in my list of 'doings' over the years
and here.
My work includes cross-disciplinary research on the analysis of evolvable
virtual-machine information-processing architectures for human-like
minds (avoiding the objections to most varieties of "functionalism").
In particular I try to show that many of our ordinary mental concepts,
e.g. "consciousness", "emotion", "belief", "desire", "intention",
"intelligence", and other cognitive and affective concepts are partly
confused `cluster concepts' which can be clarified and refined (not
eliminated) if we think of them as implicitly referring to an
architecture which supports a variety of types of states and processes.
Getting clear about ways of extending and improving the concepts, and
avoiding endless disputes at cross purposes, requires investigating
architectures capable of explaining many kinds of normal adult human
capabilities and comparing them with other architectures, e.g. for
new-born infants, many kinds of animals, and many possible kinds of
robots and software agents. This leads to an analysis of
neighbourhoods in `design space' and `niche space' and ways in which
the evolution of human minds (and other animal minds) can be analysed in
terms of interacting trajectories in these two spaces.
In particular there are many more detailed ideas, some of which are
being developed within the
CoSy
Project.
Papers expounding these ideas are also being produced within the
Cognition and Affect Project. Our software
tools supporting our research and teaching are mentioned in the next
section.
This directory
contains the bulk of my publications, along with
related publications by colleagues and
students.
Recently, however, I have also started putting things in
the CoSy papers directory.
A three year project funded by the Leverhulme foundation on
Evolvable virtual information processing architectures for
human-like minds started in October 1999, and ended
in 2003.
Details are available
at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/lev/.
The 4 year EC-funded CoSy project started in September 2004
Details are available at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/
Free open source goodies
I use Linux for all my work.
There's a growing variety of free versions suited to different kinds of
individuals and organisations with different needs, for commercial users
there are commercial versions with professional support available. Two
myths spread by vendors of proprietary software about
free software are the myth that it cannot be used to make money,
refuted by the success of
Red Hat and
others, and the myth that the
licensing is a source of serious problems.
For a free open source alternative to Microsoft Office see
http://www.openoffice.org, and
instead of Internet Explorer and MS mail systems, try Mozilla
http://www.mozilla.org/, which has
improved beyond all recognition in the last few years, for browsing,
email, composing html pages, etc., or try
firefox
whose popularity as a fast, extendable, secure browser has grown at an
amazing rate.
The associated free open source email client is
thunderbird. For a
free open source calendar tool try
Mozilla calendar or sunbird.
Actually I don't use either the proprietary or the open source WYSIWYG
tools when preparing my quirky slide presentations, for reasons
explained
here.
Chinese Halloween with Intel and Linux: Is this True?
POPLOG AND SIMAGENT TOOLKIT
The Poplog system used for our teaching and research used to be an
expensive commercial product, but is now available free of charge, along
with many utilities, teaching packages and our SimAgent toolkit.
This page
provides links to various newspaper and journal reports on our work
(e.g. on how machines can have emotions) and some which were broadcast
on radio or television.
EVENTS AT INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONF ON AI (IJCAI):
1971, 1981, 1985, 1995, 2001, 2005
Following on from discussions at a
CPHC
conference in Manchester in 2001 on whether
there should be a UK strategy for research in CS and related disciplines
I wrote a draft paper outlining four different types of research
goals requiring different (but overlapping) evaluation criteria. It is
in this file, including comments and modifications from others:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/cs-research.html
Comments and criticisms welcome.
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
In June 1998 I was involved in a conference for careers advisers in UK
schools, talking about what AI is. The notes I prepared for attendees
are available at:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/aiforschools.html
This includes an attempt to explain what Artificial Intelligence is
(both its scientific and its engineering aspects) and also a list of
UK universities at which I believe it is possible to obtain a degree in
AI or Cognitive Science. It will be updated from time to time.
I was on a panel set up by the Quality Assurance Agency for UK
Universities, to produce a "benchmarking" document to guide assessors of
university degrees in computing. I produced a document attempting to
characterise AI for that panel. It can be found here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/courses/ai.html
A major source of information about AI is provided at the web site of
the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
www.aaai.org/aitopics.
See also the survey:
"AI's greatest trends and controversies", edited by Haym Hirsh
amd Marti A. Hearst, in
IEEE Intelligent Systems and their applications,
Jan/Feb 2000 pp 8--17,
available online at
http://www.computer.org/intelligent/ex2000/pdf/x1008.pdf
The Natural Computation
group in this School has a home page, concerned with various kinds of
mainly biologically inspired techniques.
Ben Sloman (1967 - 2002),
photographed here in 1997
died of cancer on 2nd February 2002 shortly after moving from HP
Research Labs to help start up
Elixent, his
most important achievement.
A tribute to him used to be on the Elixent web site. The
web site has disappeared since Elixent was bought by
Matsushita Electric (Panasonic). Brian Williams kindly drew my
attention to an archived version
here.
This file is maintained by
Aaron Sloman, and designed to be
lynx-friendly,
and
viewable with any browser.
Email: A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk
Note to advertisers: please do not send me copies of your bulk
unsolicited email, including junk mail advertising sites
offering free sex and pornography, financial offers (bogus or
otherwise), health treatments (bogus or otherwise), special offers of
food, vacations, computing equipment, or anything else.
You are wasting your time if you do. As a matter of principle, I NEVER
buy anything advertised by bulk unsolicited email, and I report
spammers to service providers. Here are some anti-spam sites.
http://www.cauce.org/
http://spam.abuse.net/spam/
Reading Email Headers (tutorial) FAQ and
tutorial on spam
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
License.
If you use or comment on my ideas please include a URL if possible, so
that readers can see the original (or the latest version thereof).
![[Picture]](pics/aaron-CafeGroup2.jpg)
(May no longer be valid after recent changes. Will try to fix.)
