Barry Webster

Background

About Barry Webster

Teaching and research interests include: Artificial Intelligence: particularly in the area of the development of synthetic life forms. This conjures up images of trying to build androids like we've seen in the movies, but yes, that's what I'm actually trying to do. I want to see how far we can take this type of development, or if it will just remain in the movies. Combinatorial optimization: looking for optimal solutions to very complex problems, and using mathematical techniques, specialized algorithms, and heuristics to find suboptimal solutions when finding optimal solutions is impossible or infeasible. Reasoning under uncertainty: involves a lot of formalized decision theory. Particularly interested in cases where there are a lot of elements influencing the decision, conflicting objectives, and high degrees of uncertainty. Game theory: primarily interested in the predictive aspects of the theory; that is, using techniques from the theory to forecast outcomes of events. Of particular interest are behavioral aspects and situations where the “typical” conditions of the theory (e.g. participant rationality, recall of previous events, etc.) cannot be assumed.