Zafeirios Fountas

Zafeirios Fountas

Research scientist @ Emotech, research associate @ UCL, visiting lecturer @ RCA

TimeStorm

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Arizona speeding

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My PhD

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Emotech's Olly

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Neurobot

NeuroBot is an A.I. system able to control avatars (bots) within the environment of the computer game Unreal Tournament 2004, in a human-like manner. To achieve this, NeuroBot is based around a large-scale modular spiking neural network, of around 20.000 neurons, divided into specialized regions. The high level coordination of this network is carried out by an architecture based on a cognitive theory of consciousness called global workspace theory.

The first version of this system as well as the underlying theory was the outcome of my dissertation for the MSc course I attended in the Department of Computing of Imperial College London during the academic year 2010-11, under the supervision of Dr David Gamez and Dr Andreas Fidjeland who provided priceless support at every stage of this project.

The same version of NeuroBot achieved second place in the 2K BotPrize human-like bot competition at CIG 2011 in Seoul, South Korea.

Media

	New Scientist (magazine issue 2881) Title: AI cyber-fighter: does it feel human, punk? Date: 06 September 2012 by Celeste Biever
	EDGE Title: Unreal bots beat Turing test: AI players are officially more human than gamers Date: 28 September 2012 by Keith Stuart
	Bonusweb.cz (In Czech) Title: Pocitacem rizeny bojovnik chce porazit lidsky mozek. Souperi o 137 tisic Date: 11 September 2012 by Andrej Brabec

Videos

The following video illustrates a part of the graphical user interface and the performance of the system during a human-versus-bot test game.

Downloads

The presentation slides of my MSc thesis provide a brief description of this system, while a complete description can be found on my final report. Also, the neural architecture of this system is described in this paper which was presented and published in the proceedings of the CIG 2011 (IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games) in Seoul, South Korea.

Finally, a running and stable version of this software can be downloaded from this link, while its sourcecode can be found on NeuroBot's sourceforge webpage and the most recent version can be provided under request.

PANDORA

P.A.N.D.O.R.A. robotics research team (Program for the Advancement of Non Directed Operating Robotic Agents) was found in 2007 by a number of engineering and science students (including me), who wanted to apply the knowledge they accumulated over their studies on a real project. It was found under the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and today, still at the same department, it consists of 5 faculty members and 22 undergraduate students. Over the years, PANDORA's main goal has been the development of robotic vehicles that can navigate areas having suffered a natural disaster – like an earthquake – and are able to locate human victims. Using the produced robotic vehicles, PANDORA team has participated in the RoboCup - Rescue competition four times: In 2008 in China, in 2009 in Austria, in 2011 in Istanbul and more recently in 2013 in Netherlands. For more information, visit here.