Honours and Masters project

The brains of all bilaterally symmetric animals on Earth are divided into left and right hemispheres. The anatomy and functionality of the hemispheres have a large degree of overlap, but they specialize to possess different attributes. This principle is poorly understood and has not been exploited in AI/ML. The right hemisphere is more dominant for novelty, and the left for routine. Activity slowly moves to the left hemisphere as a task is perfected. In this project, we apply that principle to continual RL, where new tasks are introduced over time.

The hippocampus is critical for episodic memory, a key component of intelligence, and a sense of self. There are a number of computational models, but none of them consider the fact that the hippocampus is, like the rest of the brain, divided into Left and Right hemispheres. Division into Left and Right is poorly understood, but undoubtedly critical, as it is a remarkably conserved feature of all bilaterally symmetric animals on Earth.

The brains of all bilaterally symmetric animals on Earth are divided into left and right hemispheres. The anatomy and functionality of the hemispheres have a large degree of overlap, but they specialize to possess different attributes. This principle is poorly understood and has not been exploited in AI/ML. Previously, we mimicked biological differences between hemispheres, and achieved specialization and superior performance in a classification task that matched behavioral observations.

This multidisciplinary project combines cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP), Chinese Studies and Political Science. The project aims to develop a deeper understanding of how official discourse has developed throughout the history of the People’s Republic of China. The main focus will be on text in the People’s Daily, the largest newspaper in China and the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

A lot of decision support systems have been developed to predict or suggest a diagnosis about the health conditions of patients with the aim to assist clinicians in their decisional process. One of the techniques that is proved to present an efficient tool for medical healthcare decision making is Bayesian networks (BNs). BNs are recognized as efficient graphical models that can be used to explain the relationships between variables.

Visually discriminating the identity of multiple (similar looking) objects in a scene and creating individual tracks of their movements over time, namely multi-object tracking (MOT), is one of the basic yet most crucial vision tasks, imperative to tackle many real-world problems in surveillance, robotics/autonomous driving, health and biology.

The ability to forecast human trajectory and/or body motion (i.e. pose dynamics and trajectory) from camera or other visual sensors is an essential component for many real-world applications, including robotics, healthcare, detection of perilous behavioural patterns in surveillance systems.

Human behaviour understanding in videos is a crucial task in autonomous driving cars, robot navigation and surveillance systems. In a real scene comprising of several actors, each human is performing one or more individual actions. Moreover, they generally form several social groups with potentially different social connections, e.g. contribution toward a common activity or goal.

3D localisation, reconstruction and mapping of the objects and human body in dynamic environments are important steps towards high-level 3D scene understanding, which has many applications in autonomous driving, robotics interaction and navigation. This project focuses on creating the scene representation in 3D which gives a complete scene understanding i.e pose, shape and size of different scene elements (humans and objects) and their spatio-temporal relationship.

In this project, the goal is to develop a new method (using computer vision and machine learning techniques) for robotic navigation in which goals can be specified at a much higher level of abstraction than has previously been possible. This will be achieved using deep learning to make informed predictions about a scene layout and navigating as an active observer in which the predictions inform actions.