Overview of the AI Group

The goal of AI research is to seek an understanding of the computational processes underlying intelligent behaviour. AI is an interdisciplinary subject, in several senses. Intelligence is manifested in many different ways, including our abilities to speak, remember, reason, perceive, and interact with our physical environment. Intelligent behaviour can also be studied within many different disciplines, including psychology, logic, linguistics and philosophy. What makes AI a branch of computer science is that it aims to produce theories of intelligence which are precise enough and detailed enough to be implemented on a computer.

The AI group in the Department of Computer Science at Otago was established in 1987, by Albert Yeap, and has grown steadily since then.

The group is affiliated to several of the University of Otago's Research Themes and research groups:

	Memory: Mechanisms, Process and Applications
	Bioinformatics and Computational Molecular Biology
	Graphics and Vision Research Lab
	Computational Linguistics

Members of the group play an active role in several AI-related organisations, journals and conferences, including:

	Neural Network World (international peer-reviewed journal)
	The Association for Computational Linguistics
	COLING - The International Conference on Computational Linguistics
	INNS-NNN Symposia on New directions in Neural Networks
	ICONIP 2008 (15th International Conference on Neural Information Processing of the Asia-Pacific Neural Network Assembly)

The group has close links with several institutions, in New Zealand and abroad:

	The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh
	The Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, at the University of Pennsylvania
	The Centre for Language Technology at Macquarie University
	The The Knowledge Engineering Laboratory in Otago's Department of Information Science
	The AI Research Group at Victoria University of Wellington
	The Cognitive Science Laboratory at The University of Liège
	Department of Applied Informatics at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia