Research
In my PhD dissertation, Practical Artificial Commonsense, I created a new approach to giving software and robots the same kind of everyday commonsense that people possess. I call this project Comirit.
I am currently applying this research to robotics within the Innovation and Enterprise Research Laboratory. I am designing robots that are intelligent, that think for themselves, that have commonsense and that can cope in any environment.
While I draw on concepts from computer science and logic, the focus of my work is very pragmatic.
See below for some of my research activities and publications.
Activities and Grants
I am/was a chief investigator on the following grants:
- UTS Teaching and Learning Grant 2015, Video Recording Studio for the School of Software
- UTS Chancellor’s Post Doctoral Research Fellowship 2012-2015, Self-configuring Cognitive Architectures
- ARC Linkage Grant 2012-2014, A Framework for Physical and Social Collaboration: Towards the Smarter Planet Vision
- NSW TechVouchers 2011, Analysis of Time-Based Social Media User Trends
- UTS Communities of Practice 2009, Collaborative Smart Mobile Innovation
- UTS Gender Equity Fund 2009, Leadership in Innovation (as a mentor)
I have served as a conference chair for NRAC 2009, PCAR 2008 and 2010, Smarter Living 2011, Commonsense 2013 and ICSR 2014 as well as on the advisory board of Commonsense, and the workshop chair of ISWC 2013. I also work as a reviewer and program committee member of many conferences and journals including IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, AIJ, HRI, AGI and Social Robotics.
I have also been heavily involved in UTS’s team in the Robocup “Standard Platform” Robot Soccer League.
Publications
A selection of publications appears below.
Commonsense Reasoning
- Benjamin Johnston, An Interface for Crowd-sourcing Spatial Models of Commonsense, International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning 2011
- Benjamin Johnston, The Collection of Physical Knowledge and its Application in Intelligent Systems, International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2011
- Benjamin Johnston, Practical Artificial Commonsense, PhD thesis 2009/2010 (UTS Best Dissertation Prize)
- Benjamin Johnston, The Toy Box Problem (and a Preliminary Solution), International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2010
- Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, Conservative and Reward-driven Behavior Selection in a Commonsense Reasoning Framework, AAAI Fall Symposium on Multi-Representational Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence 2009
- Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, A Formal Framework for the Symbol Grounding Problem, International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2009
- Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, Autonomous Learning of Commonsense Simulations, International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning 2009
- Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, Comirit: Commonsense Reasoning by Integrating Simulation and Logic, International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2008
- Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, A Generic Framework for Approximate Simulation in Commonsense Reasoning Systems, International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning 2007
Social Robotics
- Tuck Wah Leong, Benjamin Johnston, Co-design and Robots: A Case Study of a Robot Dog for Aging People, International Conference on Social Robotics 2016
- Jonathan Vitale, Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, The face-space duality hypothesis: a computational model, Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 2016
- Syed Ali Raza, Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, Reward from Demonstration in Interactive Reinforcement Learning, Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference 2016
- Hugo Romat, Mary-Anne Williams, Xun Wang, Benjamin Johnston, Henry Bard, Natural Human-Robot Interaction Using Social Cues, International Conference on Human Robot Interaction 2016
- Jonathan Vitale, Mary-Anne Williams, Benjamin Johnston, Giuseppe Boccignone, Affective facial expression processing via simulation: A probabilistic model, Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2014
- Jonathan Vitale, Mary-Anne Williams, Benjamin Johnston, Socially Impaired Robots: Human Social Disorders and Robots’ Socio-Emotional Intelligence, International Conference on Social Robotics 2014
- Michael Beetz, Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Robotics 2014
- Xun Wang, Mary-Anne Williams, Peter Gärdenfors, Jonathan Vitale, Shaukat Abidi, Benjamin Johnston, Benjamin Kuipers, Alan Huang, Directing human attention with pointing, IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication 2014
- Wei Wang, Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, Social Networking for Robots to Share Knowledge, Skills and Know-how, International Conference on Social Robotics 2012
- Rony Novianto, Benjamin Johnston, Mary-Anne Williams, Attention in the ASMO Cognitive Architecture, International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2010
- Mary-Anne Williams, Peter Gärdenfors, Benjamin Johnston, Glenn Wightwick, Anticipation as a Strategy: A Design Paradigm for Robotics, International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management 2010
- Muh. Anshar, Benjamin Johnston, Ronny Novianto, Christopher Stanton, Xun Wang, Mary-Anne Williams, The Bear Project: A Cognitive Approach to Robotics (System Demo), International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling 2008
Internet of Things
- Karla Felix Navarro, Valerie Gay, Benjamin Johnston, Peter Leijdekkers, Ewan Vaughan, Xun Wang, Mary-Anne Williams, SocialCycle: What Can a Mobile App Do To Encourage Cycling?, IEEE goSMART workshop on Global Trends in Smart Cities 2013
- Benjamin Johnston, Fangkai Yang, Rogan Mendoza, Xiaoping Chen, Mary-Anne Williams, Ontology Based Object Categorization for Robots, International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management 2008
- Rogan Mendoza, Benjamin Johnston, Fangkai Yang, Zhisheng Huang, Xiaoping Chen, Mary-Anne Williams, OBOC: Ontology Based Object Categorisation for Robots, International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems 2007
Inference with Defeasible Logic