My first published journal article, Language Individuation and Marker Words: Shakespeare and His Maxwell’s Demon, has been featured as a research highlight in the PLoS (Public Library of Science) blog. This serves as a reminder that machine learning (and computer science in general) can be applied to solve complex tasks in an incredibly wide range […] Read more »
ACRA2013 Presentation
Earlier today, I presented the publication Probabilistic Gradient Ascent with Applications to Bipedal Robot Locomotion at the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA2013, the largest robotics conference in the southern hemisphere). This presentation can be viewed below: This paper, which details the development of a non-convex optimisation algorithm and its application to optimising walk […] Read more »
Degrees Demystified: Computer Science vs Software Engineering
I have been promising this article for quite a while now, but as with anything I feel strongly about, I would rather wait until I have the time to put in the effort it deserves. After a morning of proverbially bashing my head against the desk running gene ontology experiments in R, today appears to […] Read more »
Mullet over: how robotics can get a wriggle on with fishy locomotion
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. By David Budden, University of Melbourne Teaching a robot to walk – even poorly – requires huge investment into computational resources. How is it that even the simplest animals are able to achieve far more sophisticated feats of manoeuvrability? In a paper published […] Read more »
Award for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning
Firstly, apologies for the delay in the upcoming article promised in my last post. As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, postgraduate research has a way of suppressing your awareness of time passing… But for now, I have some good news to report! A few weeks ago, I was nominated by the head of […] Read more »
Robotics, Shakespeare and Coffee
Once again, I have been sucked into the Ph.D vortex where time loses all meaning and regretfully neglected this website for nearly two months! To get the ball rolling once more, I’ll post a few quick updates about what’s going on in my life. This weekend I will (hopefully) follow up with an article I […] Read more »
Ph.D Update: August 2013
It has been four months since my previous update regarding my Ph.D research direction, so with an upcoming confirmation and guest seminar presentations for the Hunter Medical Research Institute and University of Newcastle, now seems a good time to bring everyone up to speed with my progress! In short, my research focus has began to […] Read more »
Shakespeare and cancer diagnoses: how bard can it be?
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. By Pablo Moscato, University of Newcastle; David Budden, University of Melbourne; Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle, and John W. Marsden, University of Newcastle Shakespeare’s plays and cancer: two seemingly unrelated topics with an underlying common thread. The techniques that computational linguistics and computer […] Read more »
RoboCup: Day 6
Things are starting to get real in the 2D simulation league, with Gliders2013 making it through comfortably to tomorrow’s finals rounds (as one of the top 8 from 24 teams). Despite our fortunate performance over the last few days, the remaining teams are all incredibly good, so it will take no small amount of good […] Read more »
RoboCup: Day 5
Today was a very exciting day indeed! With too much going on to waste any time, here is a brief list of the highlights of RoboCup day 5: A visit by Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, who took a tour of the entire competition and watched Eindhoven University of Technology compete in the mid-sized league. […] Read more »