Dr. Mark Humphrys's research is on non-symbolic (or sub-symbolic) Artificial Intelligence. He is interested in the origins of intelligence, both the evolutionary story of the species, and the developmental history of the individual. He is 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 on which we focus so much attention. This substrate may be where the hard part of AI lies.

Dr. Humphrys is interested in machines that have more autonomy - machines that learn their own behaviour from interaction with the world, rather than their behaviour being merely an expression of the intelligence of the programmer. He is interested in all types of self-modifying, learning, evolving or self-organising models of mind. Dr. Humphrys is particularly interested in decentralised Society of Mind models.

He has currently 4 PhD students working on a range of topics in AI. For full information, see: http://computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/research.html

His most active current project is the "World-Wide-Mind" research group. This is a new idea for helping AI scale up, and enabling the construction of large, complex minds by teams of multiple dispersed authors. This work proposes that the construction of advanced artificial minds may be too difficult for any single laboratory to complete.

At present, no easy system exists whereby a working mind can be made from the components of two or more laboratories. This system aims to change that and accelerate the growth of Artificial Intelligence, once the requirement that a single laboratory understand the entire system is removed.

For full information, see: http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/wwm.html and the portal site http://w2mind.org