Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Philippe Pasquier

Wednesday Jan 30th, 2008 at 2:30 - 4.00 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Philippe Pasquier

Simon Fraser University, School of Interactive Art and Technology

Title: Agents, Multiagent Systems and Metacreation.

Abstract:

Philippe Pasquier is pursuing both a scientific and an artistic research agenda. Since he is a new faculty at SIAT, this presentation aims to introduce past and current scientific and artistic works as well as to discuss some intentions about future ones. This is thus a wide overview rather than a focused, in depth, presentation. The (pragmatic and prosaic) goal is to present his background as an artistic practitioner and scientific researcher in order to inform the attendees (whether they are research students or faculty) and trigger some potential topics for interactions and/or collaborations.

In a first part, scientific research projects conducted in the field of autonomous agents and multiagent systems (MAS) will be introduced. The works presented include: modeling interdependencies between agents with social commitments, defining more flexible and expressive agent communication languages, experiments in human-agent interaction, introducing a coherentist (as opposed to foundationalist) agent architecture, modeling the cognitive aspects of agent communication pragmatics, modeling argumentation dialogues, inquiring the theory and practice of interest-based negotiation, applying human computation to ontology creation. Besides the mere clarification of these idiomatic expressions, the basic ideas driving the development of agents and multiagent systems will be presented.

In a second part, various artistic realisations will be introduced through the consideration of a bi-dimensional classification of new media practices. Various works will be (briefly) presented along two axes: (1) the relationship of the artists and their tools, (2) the relationship between the audience and the media content. Emphasis will be put on metacreation (i.e., the development of machines endowed with creative behavior) since it is where those two streams of research seem to converge.

Bio:

After studying computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences in Europe (France and Belgium), Philippe Pasquier completed his Ph.D. in 2005 in the field of agents and multiagent systems at the Dialogue, Agent and Multi-AgentS laboratory (DAMAS) in the Computer Science Department of Laval University (Québec, Canada). He has then been working on interaction and communication theories as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne (Australia). Since January 2008, he is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) of Simon Fraser University's Faculty of Applied Sciences (Vancouver, Canada). There, he is conducting both a scientific and an artistic research agenda.

His scientific research in artificial intelligence focuses on supporting and automating complex multi-party decision-making using techniques from distributed artificial intelligence, artificial agents and multiagent systems. In his artistic practice, dominated by sonic arts, he is interested in studying and exploiting the various relationships and synergies between art, science and technology.

In ten years of artistic practice, he has been acting as a performer, director, composer, musician, producer and educator in many different contexts. He is also serving as an active member and administrator of several artistic collectives and company (Robonom, Phylm, Miji), art centers (Avatar, Bus Gallery) and artistic organizations (P: Media art, Machines) in Europe, Canada and Australia. His work has been shown on four continents and funded or supported by more than 20 cultural institutions including the Canada Council for the Arts, the French Ministry of Culture and the Australia Council for the Arts.

More details are available on his Web page: http://www.sfu.ca/~ppa12/