Welcome to Karla M Parussel's Home Page.

Karla M Parussel

Department of Computing Science and Mathematics
University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA   SCOTLAND

Current work

I am currently employed as a Research Assistant on the inter-life project for two years starting from December 1st 2008.

PhD

I studied for a PhD at the University of Stirling from October 2002 - October 2005. The focus of the PhD was on using a bottom-up approach to emulate emotions and neuromodulation in intelligent and autonomous agents. The PhD argued that emotions are a phenomona that emerges from the interaction of certain subcomponents within an agent and to properly understand what emotions are and recreate them, one must model these subcomponents and their interactions. This contrasts with existing top-down approaches which give agents symbolic representations of, or discrete functions that emulate, the observed effect of emotions without understanding how they were originally produced. The work created biologically plausible models of the subcomponents in order to increase our understanding of the environmental and functional requirements for such emotions to emerge. Specifically the work made efforts to explain the functional uses of neuromodulation when applied to neural networks and their relevance to emotions in natural agents. The majority of research on neural networks when applied to autonomous and intelligent agents is generally concerned with the interconnectivity of neurons.

Publications from PhD

For a more recent list, please go to my main website. The link is at the bottom.

• Parussel, K.M.: A bottom-up approach to emulating emotions using neuromodulation in agents. PhD thesis, University of Stirling (2006).
  


• K. Parussel and L.S. Smith, Cost minimisation and Reward maximisation. A neuromodulating minimal disturbance system using anti-hebbian spike timing-dependent plasticity, In:Proceedings of the Symposium on Agents that Want and Life: Motivational and Emotional roots of Cognition and Action at the AISB-05 conference, The society for the study of artificial intelligence and the simulation of behaviour (2005) 98-100
  Vrml files: structure, modulating and non-modulating. Screen grabs: structure, modulating and non-modulating.

About me

I'm a keen paraglider and always move to within sight of the launch site. Although this just serves to torment me during the few days that Scotland is dry and not blown out as I am invariably needing to work on something important. I'm also into scuba diving in the UK, mountain biking, martial arts (JKD, Kali, Thai boxing and Wing Tsun), guitar playing, digital video editing and hill walking. I can't do all these hobbies all the time and where I move influences what hobbies I do. I combine many of these hobbies with photography.

Links

• Maintained website (includes email address, CV, latest publications, bibtex etc)
  
• As a regular poster on discussion forums, I realised that there was an underlying theme to issues such as peak oil, monetary reform, the shortage of rare-earth minerals etc. I set up a forum to discuss the issue from all perspectives, globally, what governments should be doing and how we can prepare for an Unsustainable Future as individuals.
• Tamara's photography, a friend from university.
  
• An online book store selling fiction ebooks where you can browse, buy and discuss books with readers and authors. It sells fiction ebooks and provides forums for a community feel.
• Vrml files can be viewed using cortona.