This laboratory focuses on those aspects of Artificial Intelligence that have to do with language, learning and cognition. Our capabilities and the technologies we develop and deploy are broadly related to the School of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics' research concentrations in:

  • Knowledge and Interaction Technologies
  • Flinders Medical Devices and Technologies
  • Maritime Electronics & Autonomous Systems

The primary focus of the AI/LT Lab is learning – learning the language of people and the world (including ontology. A very interdisciplinary approach is taken that seeks to model and develop neurologically plausible psycholinguistic theories as well as engineering commercially viable interface technologies. Learning human language goes beyond understanding speech or parsing sentences or disambiguating multiple senses of words and includes understanding body language, gesture, facial expression and a wide variety of emotions as well as research in AudioVisual Speech Recognition. Learning about the world means understanding what’s out there and how it relates to us and represents the original philosophical concept of Ontology which was the term Powers adopted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s as a generalization of Semantics that emphasized the need to connect meanings with the real world rather than just chase words round a dictionary – this concept was popularized by Harnad as Symbol Grounding in the 1990s. Semantics and Ontology without Grounding are only a shadow of reality and are insufficient for understanding, according to Powers, Harnad and an increasing number of Cognitive Scientists.

Robots, physical and simulated, play a major role in our attempts to learn a grounded syntax and semantics in which the computer/system/robot really understands what is being talked about. Both grammar and meaning are learned by children in an unsupervised way by learning patterns in context, and we emulate this with our AI systems. The use of multimodal sensors, including touch, vision and sound, allows for a number of interesting enhancements of the way information is communicated to a computer. For example, combining camera and microphone input allows lip-reading to be used to enhance speech recognition under noisy conditions. In addition, this opens the door to the possibility of picking up additional expressional and emotional content, of tracking where a speaker is looking when talking, and conversely of synthesizing appropriate acoustic and facial expressions, and looking at the objects being talked about. This is a major focus of our Thinking and Teaching Head projects, in which area we hold two current ARC grants and have a commercialized spinoff company/product: CleverMe. This research involves interdisciplinary collaboration both extramurally, including with institutions in the US, Germany and China, and within Flinders, including the Flinders Educational Futures Research Institute

Biometric signals are another source of information, and can not only be used as inputs in their own right, but can be used to correlate with, and thus learn and validate, theories and models of language, learning and emotion. The signal processing and learning expertise developed for speech and language is also being applied to developing new techniques in biomedical signal processing, and in particular for the processing EEG in real world conditions. Our Brain Computer Interface has two facets:

  1. allowing us to understand more of what is going on in a person's brain (including their emotional state and their level of skill acquisition or situation awareness), and
  2. allowing a person to interact with a computer or control devices such as a wheelchair or other vehicle.
Our EEG research is an interdisciplinary collabortion with the School of Medicine's Epilepsy Laboratory and Human EEG Unit and we currently hold two joint ARC Discovery grants for this work.  We also cooperate with researchers at the University of Southern Queensland in a number of related initiatives.

Artificial Intelligence and Language Technology at Flinders has expertise and capabilities in the following areas:

  • Information Retrieval & Visualisation
  • Autonomous Vehicles & Robots
  • Vision/Image Processing
  • Cognitive & Behavioural Science
  • Computational Psycholinguistics & Cognitive Linguistics
  • Medical Signals & Imaging
  • Language & Learning Technology
  • Speech/Audio Processing
  • Assistive & Educational Technologies
  • Human Factors & Computer Interaction
  • Sensory & Signal Processing

People

  • Humayra Ali – Postgraduate Researcher
  • Tom Anderson – Postgraduate Researcher
  • Adham Atyabi – Postgraduate Researcher
  • Prof. Richard Clark - Associate Investigator
  • Jin Hu Huang - Postgraduate Researcher
  • Prof. Xibin Jia – Associate Investigator (China)
  • Fatemeh Khazab – Postgraduate Researcher
  • Simon Lang – Postgraduate Researcher
  • Dr Richard Leibbrandt - Postgraduate Researcher
  • Dr Trent Lewis - Research Fellow
  • Prof. Yujian Li – Associate Investigator (China)
  • Dr Martin Luerssen - Research Fellow
  • Dr Takeshi Matsumoto – Associate Investigator
  • Marissa Milne – Postgraduate Researcher
  • Dr Darius Pfitzner – Associate Investigator
  • Dr Kenneth Pope - Principal Investigator
  • Prof David Powers - Principal Investigator and Contact Person
  • Sherry Randhawa - Investigator and Postgraduate Researcher
  • Kenneth Treharne - Postgraduate Researcher
  • E/Prof. John Willoughby - Associate Investigator
  • Dr Dongqiang Yang – Associate Investigator (China)

Recent Grant Income

  • Burnham, D. K., Dale, R., Stevens, C. J., Powers, D. M., Davis, C. W., Buchholz, J. M., Kuratate, T., Kim, J., Paine, G. C., Kitamura, C. M., Wagner, M., Moeller, S., Black, A. W., Schultz, T. and Bothe, H. H. (2006-2010). From Talking Heads to Thinking Heads: A Research Platform for Human Communication . ARC Thinking Systems: $3,400,000.
  • Powers, D. M., Clark, C. R., Pope, K. J. and Willoughby, J. O. (2009-2011). Heterodensity neuroimaging techniques for spatiotemporal identification and localization. ARC Discovery: $301,000.
  • Broberg, I. M., Pope, K. J., Shuttleworth, C. W. and Willoughby, J. O. (2010). Cell swelling and EEG ripples: components in the transformation of normal brain activity into seizure. NH&MRC: $357,125.
  • Burnham, D., Cox, F., Butcher, A., Fletcher, J., Wagner, M., Epps, J., Ingram, J., Arciuli, J., Togneri, R., Rose, P., Kemp, N., Cutler, A., Dale, R., Kuratate, T., Powers, D., Cassidy, S., Grayden, D., Loakes, D., Bennamoun, M., Lewis, T., Goecke, R., Best, C., Bird, S., Ambikairajah, E., Hajek, J., Ishihara, S., Kinoshita, Y., Tran, D., Chetty, G. and Onslow, M. (2010). The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio-visual speech corpus of Australian English. ARC LIEF: $650,000.
  • Pope, K., Powers, D., Lewis, T. and Willoughby, J. (2011-2013). Enhanced brain and muscle signal separation verified by electrical scalp recordings from paralysed awake humans. ARC Discovery: $225,000.

Further Information

We would be please to supply further information about our activities.  In particular, opportunities exist for high achieving postgraduates to join the program.  Please contact Professor David Powers .