Rob Saunders

Background

About Rob Saunders

Rob Saunders is Associate Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands and Adjunct Research Fellow in the Centre for Transformative Media Technology at Swinburne University, Australia. His research explores the role of intrinsic motivation in individual, social and cultural creativity through the development of computational models of curiosity, agent-based simulations and creative robotics. Rob was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Sydney for his work on “Curious Design Agents and Artificial Creativity.” Previously, Rob studied for a B.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh where he graduated with 1st Class Honours. Rob has worked within academia as a researcher and lecturer. In addition to his research in computational creativity and the modelling of curiosity, Rob’s research collaborations have included the development of a hierarchical co-evolutionary model of design, computational models of stem cell systems and distributed sensing systems. As a lecturer, Rob has taught in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Architecture and New Media departments in universities across London, Brighton and Sydney; his teaching has included Systems Architecture, Computer Programming, Networks and Operating Systems, Games Technology, Generative Design and Creative Systems. Rob’s commercial work experience includes working as a technical consultant to artists and designers on a number of cutting-edge projects and as an engineer in the research and development labs at CRL Ltd, working in a variety of areas including code optimisation, data-mining and text retrieval systems.