Daniel J Hulme
Awarded VEIV EngD
The raison d'etre of this research is to elucidate the fundamental principles that describe the functional structure and behaviour of complex biological systems in terms of their ecological histories.Thought experiments involving complex phenomena like emergence and the creative potential of evolving system are too difficult to analyse from the armchair, but we are now able to study them with computer simulations. I will be designing and implementing a computational model to evolve the visual system of virtual agents, and will be developing a network analysis tool to extract network data allowing us to suggest the possible underlining rules represented within the structure agents visual system. This project requires interdisciplinary collaboration between fields such as neuroscience, computer science, robotics, cognitive science and biology.