Overview

I am currently working with Murray Shanahan in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. As part of the EPSRC project 'Modular Neural Simulation with Reconfigurable Hardware' I am integrating the NeMo CUDA accelerated neural simulator with my SpikeStream neural simulator. When this software is complete I will be using it to develop spiking neural networks for robot control.

Last year I worked with Igor Aleksander on new ways of analyzing and understanding neural networks. One aspect of this work is the development of algorithms that can measure the information exchanged between neurons - often referred to as the information integration of a network. We developed a new way of measuring information integration called liveliness, and compared the accuracy and performance of liveliness with Balduzzi and Tononi's state-based Φ algorithm. This work on network analysis has considerable overlaps with my research on consciousness, machine consciousness and synthetic phenomenology.

During my PhD I developed a spiking neural network that controlled the SIMNOS virtual robot and used models of imagination and emotion to attend to positive stimuli in its environment. A paper describing this work can be found here.

When I worked on the Safeguard project I collaborated on the development of an agent system that could protect electricity and telecommunications management networks against attacks, failures and accidents. I am also developing a MIDI Agent System that uses the interaction between different agents to generate music in real time.