Una-May O'Reilly: Background and Research Agenda

I am a post-doctoral associate at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab where I participate in the cognobotics project whose namesake is Cog. That makes makes me a member of the Zoo which is headed by Rodney Brooks. I apparently am guilty by association with the Cog builders.

Currently I am investigating a number of things which are concerned with humanoid robotics, embodied intelligence, evolutionary computation and machine learning. For example, I am studying the neurophysiology of vision systems, have attended a machine learning reading group, led a discussion on the theory of biological and computational fitness landscapes in the MIT Artificial Life group and joined a reading group going through "Essentials of Neural Science and Behaviour" by Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell (Appleton and Lange, 1995).

One particular design project involves evolving eye and face detection for Cog. Stay tuned for preliminary reports on this endeavor.

Turning to the past: I was a doctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute from April, 1993 to September, 1995. That's why my Web page used to be there.

At SFI my thesis research was under the Adaptive Computation Program which is directed by Melanie Mitchell. Then, as also now, I study adaptive search techniques for program discovery. The roots of my work go back to Genetic Programming. Along the way I've written papers that comment on

GP and Hierarchicality,
GP and the building block hypothesis,
Building block functions for genetic programming,
A Comparison of GP, Simulated Annealing and Hill Climbing,
Hybridized Crossover-Based Search Techniques for Program Discovery,

From 1987 to 1995 I was also registered full-time in the Ph.D. program at the School of Computer Science, Carleton University , Ottawa, Canada. My advisor (or supervisor in Canadian terms) was Franz Oppacher. I successfully defended my thesis on Sept. 15, 1995.

On the personal side: I remain fairly patriotic despite having moved from Ottawa, Canada to Cambridge, USA. I am very fond of dogs - there are many in Santa Fe whom I have dog-sat. I also have two mutts of my own. I like to play tennis. Some links to tennis pages follow:

And, in 1993 I attended the Summer Session of the International Space University as part of the Canadian delegation. Look for even more pointers related to all this here soon.

Under construction!

Una-May's home page] | [Papers] | [Thesis] | [EC CFP]