A/Prof David Powers

Research Interests:

David Powers is Associate Professor of Computer Science and has research interests in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. His specific research framework takes Language, Logic and Learning as the cornerstones for a broad Cognitive Science perspective on Artificial Intelligence and its practical applications.

Projects

Major Artificial Intelligence and Language Technology Lab projects include

• the Robot Baby - Here we aim to get a computer to learn it the same way a baby does. This involves embedding the computer in a real or simulated world so that it can learn about language and the world. Previous work focused on a robot baby/doll with a variety of sensors, microphones, cameras and motors combined with techniques for fusing information from different sources;
• the Intelligent Room - A related application is an intelligent room with multiple microphones and cameras allowing tracking of speakers and homing in on the desired signal whilst canceling noise and echoes. A natural language/speech interface allowing control of home/office devices is being commercialized by I2Net in association with Clipsal. New techniques have also been developed for Blind Signal Separation as well as for finding and tracking faces and lips and for fusing visual lip reading results with auditory speech recognition;
• Talking Head -> Thinking Head -> Teaching Head - Now we are combining speech and language processing, auditory and visual reading of lips/speech and expressions/emotions with dialogue modeling in specific applications in a $3.4M 5 year ARC/NHMRC research project in collaboration with the University of Western Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Canberra. Applications for PhD/Honours places are open until October 31st/November 20th 2007 resp. See our scholarships website for application details and conditions, and contact David Powers on 0414 824307 to discuss the opportunities and the requirements of the positions.
• the Brain Computer Interface - Beyond the Speech Control Interface where we control devices by talking, we can also control devices by thinking! This work is undertaken with Assoc. Prof. Richard Clark and the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory which reported some of the very first results in this area. We are developing interfaces both to monitor the mental state of a person (e.g. stress, skill, fatigue) as well as for thought control of devices ranging from a cursor on the screen to a wheelchair. Our signal processing technologies are for the first time allowing brain interfaces to move out of the lab and into the field in the presence of muscular activity and other noise that would normally be expected to swamp the signals from the brain. Some of this research has been performed in the context of contracts from DSTO.
• Intelligent Search and Visualization - Information Retrieval and Web Search are the major current applications involving natural language and provide a challenging test for the techniques we are developing. Specific natural language techniques like syntactic and semantic analysis, and applications such as selection of query words and extraction of key phrases, are being explored in a Human Factors context where we evaluate how our system performance compares with human performance and how best to organize and present information to humans to maximize transfer of information and user efficiency.

Professional Interests:

Powers has over 150 publications, has supervised over 30 theses at Honours, Masters or PhD level, and is responsible for a number of commercialized projects (notably I2Net and YourAmigo) as well as a number of related patent applications.

The I2Net Orion product allows you to talk to your home, office or lecture room and control blinds, lights, AV equipment, watering systems etc. It is marketed worldwide as Clipsal Homespeak as part of the Clipsal C-bus line. YourAmigo is acknowledged as a world leader in dynamic search, finding pages that are missed by conventional search engines and dramatically boosting integral search ranking and internet sales of their clients. YourAmigo has offices and web presence worldwide including East and West Coast USA, Continental Europe (Spain and Germany), the UK, Japan, China, Brazil, and Australia.

These publications and projects relate primarily to a principal research interest in Natural Language Learning (NLL) and Powers (see CV) organized some of the first events in this field and was Founding President of the Association for Computational Linguistics' Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning (SIGNLL) and initiated the associated Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL). Powers has also served as Editor-in-Chief for the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) and serves on many program committees for conferences and workshops related to his research, as well as in an advisory or reviewer capacity for a number of corporate and university organizations. Powers is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Life Member of AAAI, and a member of many other societies and networks including HCSNet, ACM and ACL.