Dublin City University - School of Computing - Staff - Dr. Mark Humphrys

Dr. Mark Humphrys BSc. Joint Hons (UCD), PhD (Cambridge) Lecturer, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland. Tel: (+353 1) 700-8059 Fax: (+353 1) 700-5442 Web: computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys Email: humphrys@computing.dcu.ie The World-Wide-Mind project: w2mind.org Family tree research: humphrysfamilytree.com Search this site:     Help on search. Teaching I lecture various Computer Science courses here in DCU. See my Teaching page, or jump direct to the course pages for: CA217 - Intro to Computer Networks CA300 - Intro to Artificial Intelligence CA425 - Artificial Intelligence CA622 - Advanced Algorithms Undergrads looking for 3rd or 4th year projects can see my list of Undergrad project ideas. Postgrads on the MSc in Bioinformatics can see my list of Masters project ideas. Admin I am currently the Working Papers Librarian. Research I am interested in   non-symbolic (or sub-symbolic) Artificial Intelligence.   I am interested in the origins of intelligence, both the long evolutionary history of the species, and the long developmental history of each individual. I am interested in the vast substrate of animal sensorimotor skills and sub-linguistic knowledge representation that lies beneath all the high-level (and recently-evolved) human cognitive skills that we focus so much attention on. This substrate to me is where the hard part of AI lies. You can start at my Research page, or go direct to my Publications list. Action Selection In particular, my research is on sub-symbolic decision-making, or Action Selection among competing, co-operating and overlapping non-symbolic behaviours. I am interested in highly-decentralised Society of Mind models. For a simple overview, there are some Introductory Movies that you can play. Multiple Minds in the same Body: My PhD thesis: "Action Selection methods using Reinforcement Learning" (1997) introduces "W-learning" - a Model of Mind whereby different parts of the mind modify their behaviour based on whether or not they are succeeding in getting the body to execute their actions. Where this is headed is towards a complex, overlapping, competing, sub-symbolic Society of Mind based on Reinforcement Learning. I think I may have been the first to use Unhappiness based models of Action Selection using Reinforcement Learning numbers - that is, based on differences between the Q-values. In terms of the World-Wide-Mind (see below), my PhD can now be seen as a model of AI where parts of the mind do not understand each other (e.g. could be written by different authors). My PhD can also now be seen as a model of AI that can survive broken links. My PhD "family tree" (Who supervised who) The World-Wide-Mind I have a new idea for helping AI scale up, and enabling the construction of large, complex minds by teams of multiple dispersed authors. This idea is called the "World-Wide-Mind". I have started a "World-Wide-Mind" research group and we have set up a portal site w2mind.org. For an introduction to this idea see: Humphrys, Mark (2001), "The World-Wide-Mind: Draft Proposal", Dublin City University, School of Computing, Technical Report no. CA-0301, February 2001. Selected news and publications: 2001 We had a paper and an implementation poster in Proc. 6th European Conf. on Artificial Life (ECAL-01), Prague, September 2001. 2002 O'Leary, Ciarán and Humphrys, Mark (2002), Lowering the entry level: Lessons from the Web and the Semantic Web for the World-Wide-Mind, poster at 1st Int. Semantic Web Conf. (ISWC-02), June 2002, Sardinia, Italy. This discusses how the WWM aims to emulate the Web with its low entry level. Humphrys, Mark and O'Leary, Ciarán (2002), Constructing complex minds through multiple authors, Proc. 7th Int. Conf. on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB-02), August 2002, Edinburgh, Scotland. This explains how various agent and animat architectures could be put online. Review of SAB-02 by Stefaan Van Ryssen in Leonardo Reviews, MIT Press. At SAB I gave a 4 minute video interview to Complexity Digest (also here). Video now offline. Page is in archive.org but not video. The project is featured in: "Download and multiply" (also here), New Scientist, 10 August 2002 issue. Also titled as "Many minds solve AI's woes". 2003 "The next best thing to a brain?" (pay-to-view), article on the WWM by Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times, 20th Mar 2003. O'Leary, Ciarán and Humphrys, Mark (2003), Building a hybrid Society of Mind using components from ten different authors, Proc. 7th European Conf. on Artificial Life (ECAL-03), Dortmund, Germany, September 14-17, 2003. 2004 O'Leary, Ciarán; Humphrys, Mark and Walshe, Ray (2004), Constructing an animat mind using 505 sub-minds from 234 different authors, Proc. 8th Int. Conf. on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB-04), July 2004, Los Angeles, CA. This is the result of our first experiment with a large number of Mind authors. AI Expert Newsletter, December 2004 2005 O'Leary, Ciarán (2005), Reuse and arbitration in diverse Societies of Mind, Proc. 16th Irish conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-05), Coleraine, Northern Ireland, September 2005. O'Leary, Ciarán; Humphrys, Mark; and Walshe, Ray (2005), A novel application of Web Services in Computer Science education, in The International Conference on "Computer as a tool" (EUROCON 2005), Belgrade, Serbia & Montenegro, November, 2005. 2006 Collaborative Online Development of Modular Intelligent Agents, by Ciarán O'Leary, Mark Humphrys and Ray Walshe, ERCIM News 64, January 2006. The Turing Test I have some writings on The Turing Test because of continued interest in "MGonz", an AI chatbot I hooked up to the Internet in 1989. This story is told in "How my program passed the Turing Test". This program is now online again, and you can talk to it once more. This has got some press recently because someone is doing the same thing on AOL Instant Messenger. Recent press: ABC News, 29th Aug 2000. "My fair KI" (or via here or here), Konrad Lischka, Spiegel online (think pay-to-view), 28th Aug 2000. AI Expert Newsletter, July 2003 My program was certainly one of the first AI programs online. I think it was the first (a) AI real-time chat program, which (b) had the element of surprise, and (c) was on the Internet. "his programme induced a dialogue more human than any other I've seen" - Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges (author of Alan Turing: the Enigma, 1983, new edition 2000) in "The Turing Test in practice" on the Alan Turing site (direct in). "one of the funniest experiments ever performed in computer science .. it is a small milestone in human history to have produced a machine that can do this." - Andrew Brown in Ch.2, "The Birth of the Selfish Gene", of The Darwin Wars, 1999. See Amazon extract. AI in general I have also some writings on AI in general. I have written for New Scientist a Popular-science introduction to the biologically-inspired type of AI. See also my Philosophy and Future of AI page. I gave a talk on the future of AI, "The Hardest Problem in the History of Science", at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Feb 2000. Apparently there was a RealVideo stream here: but I never saw it. I am quoted in a Sunday Times article, 20th Feb 2000. Also published in The Times of India (formerly online here). AI: Changing Us, Changing Them by Nina Munteanu, 23 August 2004. Computers and Internet I have been a heavy user of the Internet since 1987, and have enjoyed watching it grow up over those years, driven almost entirely by the brilliant idea of embedding the navigation in hypertext. I think I have learnt a few things over this time, and there are some slightly less formal writings and links on my Computers and Internet page. I have put up a few bits and pieces on The Internet in the 1980s. My website has been running since 1994. You can go direct to an article I wrote in 1999 for the Irish Times, which summarises a lot of my experience of the Internet over the years, called "Why on earth would I link to you?".   This article was featured in Jakob Nielsen's Spotlight. Programs Programs I have written for my website: A custom CGI script search engine (for my sub-site of the CA website only). My sub-site functions as an error-tolerant web server. When you enter a bad URL, instead of giving you a bland "404 Not Found" message, the web server redirects to my own Error Handling script, which tries to guess the URL you should have typed, using case-insensitive and partial-string matching. Try it out by entering a bad address (within my sub-site only). Programs I have written for my email: My scheme for stopping spam.

Teaching Research Publications Computers and Internet How to email me Professional pages: w2mind.org The World-Wide-Mind W-learning The MGonz chatbot History and Genealogy: humphrysfamilytree.com Hypertext Burke's Peerage pedigree format Royal Descents of famous people Most Recent Common Ancestor of all humans News feeds from other sites: Feeds processed courtesy of the incsub.org mirror of Feed2JS. Google News - Sci/Tech New Scientist DCU - Faculty of Engineering and Computing - Research news blog

History and Genealogy (Offsite)

I am an active local and family historian, and since 1983 I have done original research on a number of topics, families and houses in Irish, English and Scottish family history (including local history and motoring history). I have published on this offline, and one of the most interesting aspects of it is how to present all this complex information online through hypertext. There are now over 1000 pages of material, with probably that amount again still waiting to come online. It may take me 10 years to get all my information online.

Some of this has become part of my professional work. I have published papers on it. I have supervised Undergraduate and Masters projects based on this work. There has also been some media coverage recently.

Hypertext Burke's Peerage pedigree format

• "Hypertext Indented Narrative" pedigree format: Adapting the Burke's Peerage format for the Web, Computers in Genealogy 7(1):26-46 (Mar 2000). This paper shows how with hypertext it is possible, really for the first time in history, to draw large family trees by hand. Quite a strong claim - when people have been drawing family trees for centuries. But I believe hypertext adds something genuinely new to this ancient debate.

• Hypertext for 1-name studies v. Hypertext for family histories: A reply to John Bending, Computers in Genealogy 7(3):121-8 (Sept 2000).

Royal Descents of famous people

Most Recent Common Ancestor of all humans

• I am interviewed in "The Royal We" (also via here or here) by Steve Olson, May 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. See also interview with Olson.
  • See follow-up Dick Eastman column (or via here) and Greg Hill column.
  • See also a hilarious reference to this in Opinion Journal (also here) from The Wall Street Journal, 25 Nov 2002, in a discussion of "post-traumatic slavery disorder" and the universal victimhood (and guilt!) of our ancestors. The readers' suggestions here, with their laid-back approach to crimes committed against their ancestors, is exactly how I think people should think about ancestry - instead of nursing ancient grievances like children.
  • Steve Cook - "If Mark Humphrys is right, a thousand secret kings walk down every city street, untroubled by the weight of their crowns."

• The Connection, National Public Radio, 1 hour live discussion with Steve Olson, 2 July 2002. I thought this went well, except just one point: A caller to the show asked how this related to all of humanity descending from the sons of Noah or some such crackpot idea. I did not want to waste the show discussing the crank theory of creationism, which was disproved long ago, in the 19th century, so I just ignored it. Anyway, for the record, no, it does not relate to the sons of Noah after the Flood, since no such people existed and no such event ever took place.
• The Todd Mundt Show, National Public Radio, 4 minute interview, 6 June, broadcast 28 June 2002. Formerly here: at 28 minutes in.
• The Europeans, Radio National, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), brief interview, 11 Nov, broadcast 15th Dec 2002. The audio link is not working.

• I am quoted in a Nature news feature (copied here and here) on the paper [Rohde et al., 2004]. I speculate: "Looking at the whole sweep of the Americas, Europe, Asia, right across to Japan, I wouldn't be surprised if we had a common ancestor in the AD years." Note that it slightly misquotes me that: "A single prolific parent can have a vast influence". The original parent doesn't actually have to be prolific. All they need to have is 2 children to be a MRCA.

• The Associated Press newswire service quotes me in two articles by Matt Crenson, released July 1, 2006, and carried in many places:
  1. Article on Royal Descents, carried in many places with many titles, such as The Washington Post, Newsweek, Forbes, CBS News, ABC News, MSNBC and CTV.
  2. Article on CAs, carried in many places with many titles, such as Forbes, USA Today, Fox News and CBS News.
     • Crenson nicely phrases how we only need one ancestor to be physically descended from someone. That genealogy is not the pursuit of broad patterns (like genetics). Genealogy is the pursuit of statistical artefacts. "Though people like to think of culture, language and religion as barriers between groups, history is full of religious conversions, intermarriages, illegitimate births and adoptions across those lines. ... "And the thing is, you only need one," said Mark Humphrys, ... One ancestral link to another cultural group among your millions of forbears, and you share ancestors with everyone in that group. So everyone who reproduced with somebody who was born far from their own natal home - every sailor blown off course, every young man who set off to seek his fortune, every woman who left home with a trader from a foreign land - as long as they had children, they helped weave the tight web of brotherhood we all share."

History and Genealogy website

humphrysfamilytree.com

Politics (Offsite)

If you don't agree with me, that's fine. It's a free country. But don't take the coward's route of sending your opinion through email or in conversation. Set up your own web page. If you don't have the courage to tell the world what you think, why should anyone take you seriously?

I believe in science, reason, a secular state, the 18th century western Enlightenment, free thought, free speech, freedom of religion, liberal democracy, human rights, civil liberties, western civilization, research, technology, the right to property, capitalism, consumerism, free trade and globalisation. I would describe myself as a classic 18th-19th century liberal. In modern terminology I would be libertarian-right or a neoconservative. Basically, I agree with the left on civil liberties. I agree with the right on the economy, crime and foreign policy.

I believe that the glorious, beautiful western civilization that allows us do all this research, that allows us the freedom to write and speak, and believe what we like, is under real threat from an illiterate, know-nothing, racist medieval tyranny. The evil religious fascists that attacked New York on 9/11 represent an unimaginably dangerous threat. They will, I believe, carry out a nuclear attack on one of our beautiful cities sometime in the 21st century if they are not stopped. These evil, violent, ignorant men are the face of all our nightmares, come to take away our precious freedoms after a thousand years, and return us to the primitive darkness of the 7th century.

9/11 was the worst attack on civilization since the end of World War Two in 1945 (when Ireland was also neutral, something it should be ashamed of forever). But it was, I believe, only a wakeup call for what global Islamism has in store for us in the early 21st century if it burns and spreads like fascism and communism did. America has the moral right, indeed the duty, to pursue Al Qaeda until it is utterly and completely destroyed. It has the right to invade and depose any regime that supports them. This is not about foreign policy. This is about our survival.

If you are interested, I expand on this at length at markhumphrys.com, where I try to base my beliefs on evidence and reason. Note that I do not have the time to enter into correspondence on these topics. As I said above, if you have something to say, set up your own web site.

Defend our beautiful western civilization against medieval religious fascism. Time for Ireland to put its past behind it and become a formal ally of Britain and America. US flag links to The Project for the New American Century. Ireland image from The Open Republic Institute. UK flag links to The Anglosphere Institute. Flags from fg-a.com. See Terms of Use. For a detailed explanation of my philosophy see markhumphrys.com.