Artificial behaviour · language · robotics

Research

I study how communication and social behaviour can emerge from repeated interaction — usually by building artificial agents and letting them develop patterns that were not explicitly programmed as finished solutions.

Research practice

My research sits between language evolution, artificial behaviour, swarm robotics and embodied interaction. I am interested in questions that are difficult to separate cleanly into “linguistics” or “robotics”: how agents come to coordinate, how individual histories produce social structure, and how an action can acquire communicative meaning through use.

Robots and simulations are useful to me because they force the assumptions to be explicit. Perception, memory, learning and interaction can all be specified, changed and compared — while the resulting behaviour still has to emerge through repeated encounters between agents.

Selected examples

A few current directions

Documentation to add

Communication

Current

Emergence of communication

Investigating how communicative behaviour can grow out of interactions that initially have other functions, including ritualisation from instrumental action to cue and eventually signal.

Swarm robotics · embodied interaction · language emergence

Documentation to add

Social behaviour

Current

Swarm sociality

Studying how partner-specific interaction histories can create social structure and in-group patterns without giving robots an explicit representation of group identity.

Multi-agent systems · social learning · swarm robotics

Documentation to add

Language emergence

Ongoing

Embodied language

Treating language as a coordination process grounded in perception, action, learning and repeated interaction rather than only as manipulation of predefined symbols.

Robotics · language evolution · artificial behaviour

Documentation to add

Method

Ongoing

Artificial behaviour as an experimental method

Using simulated and physical agents as controlled experimental systems for questions about communication, cognition and collective behaviour.

Simulation · physical robots · experimental design

Across these projects, I am interested in using artificial systems not only as engineering objects, but as experimental tools for asking what minimal conditions are sufficient for social and communicative behaviour to appear.