Dr. John A. Bullinaria

School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

Tel: +44 (0)121 414 2590
Fax: +44 (0)121 414 4281

j.a.bullinaria@cs.bham.ac.uk
or
j.bullinaria@physics.org

I am currently a Senior Lecturer and Head of Quality Assurance and Enhancement in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and Deputy Director of CERCIA (The Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications). My academic career began as a theoretical physicist with a PhD on supergravity and other unified field theories followed by a post-doctoral research position working on superstring theory and quantum gravity. I then took a very early retirement to "travel the world". Having seen enough of the world (i.e. run out of money), I returned to academia three years later by retraining in artificial intelligence and taking up a series of research fellowships in psychology departments working on connectionist modelling projects (initially modelling brain damage, then various language processing tasks, and most recently, oculomotor control). I am now moving towards more applied artificial intelligence research, but continue to work on brain modelling and other aspects of cognitive science. Currently, I am primarily working on the application of evolutionary computation techniques for optimising neural network systems, though I maintain an interest in many of my older research areas.

Links to the rest of my web site

Publications page - contains a list of my publications, with an increasing number of them available online.

Brief CV - find out which ten universities have been lucky enough to have me there.

Timetable/availability - gives some clues as to when you might find me in my office.

Teaching and admin pages - links to course details, lecture notes/handouts, project ideas, admin details, and such like.

Research Interests

My current research interests cover a number of inter-related areas:

  • Evolutionary computation - biologically inspired algorithms, the evolution of efficient neural network systems, the Baldwin Effect, individual differences, variable neural plasticity, incremental learning, the evolution of modularity, and life history evolution.
  • Representations of lexical semantics (working with Joe Levy, Roehampton University) - their extraction from large spoken and written corpora, their optimization, their validation, and their use in models of natural language processing.
  • Adaptable motor/sensor control systems - traditional and neural network models, optimization by learning and evolution, the interaction of learning and evolution, models of oculomotor control, and applications to robotics.
  • Connectionist neuropsychology - the simulation of brain damage using artificial neural networks, the implications for the inference from double dissociation to modularity, and the problems of small scale artefacts in such simulations.
  • Models of reading, spelling and past tense acquisition - NETtalk style models that do not require pre-processing of the training data, the incorporation of semantic routes, and the simulation of developmental and acquired dyslexias.
  • Models of lexical decision - managing without an explicit lexicon, cascaded activation approaches to modeling reaction times, and the simulation of semantic, associative and morphological priming.
  • Understanding the internal representations of trained neural networks - analysis of hidden unit activations using principal component analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, discriminant analysis, and output weight projections.
  • Neural network performance with noisy and ambiguous data - mixture models, the multi-target approach, and coping with missing context information.
  • Time series prediction - neural network based systems, temporal representations, "rocket science".

    I am also on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications.

    Links to other things I am/was associated with

    Natural Computation Research in Birmingham - the main local research grouping I belong to.

    CERCIA - The Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications, of which I am Deputy Director.

    Corpus Derived Semantic Representations - The outputs of my research with Joe Levy on lexical semantics.

    The Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW) Series which I regularly contribute to.

    The 8th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN VIII) which took place in Birmingham, 18-22 September 2004.

    The 9th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW9) which took place in Plymouth, 8-10 September 2004.

    UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI-02) which took place at the University of Birmingham, 2-4 September 2002.

    Workshop on Distributional Methods in Language Modelling which took place at the University of Birmingham on 28 August 2002.

    This page is maintained by John Bullinaria. Last updated on 6 February 2012.