Neil R. Grabois Professor in Natural Sciences and Engineering
Computer Science Department
Swarthmore College
500 College Ave.
Swarthmore, PA 19081
610-328-8565
meeden@cs.swarthmore.edu
I am a Full Professor in the Computer Science Department at Swarthmore
College.
I also participate in the interdisciplinary program Cognitive
Science. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science with a minor in Cognitive Science from Indiana University. I
received my B.A. in Mathematics
from Grinnell College.
Fall 2024
On sabbatical
Artificial Intelligence Toolkit (aitk)
Developed in collaboration with Doug Blank
and James
Marshall and first released in 2021, this toolkit contains both an
open source set of Python tools and a set of computational essays for
exploring and understanding Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive
Science, Machine Learning, and Robotics. The code and essays are
designed to work easily in any web browser and allow users to gain
valuable hands-on experience with these important topics. The essays
were significantly expanded in Summer 2024 with the help of three
Swarthmore College undergraduates Levin Ho, Morgan
McErlean, and Alex You. The toolkit is available at
github.com/ArtificialIntelligenceToolkit/aitk.
Research
My current research is in the field of developmental robotics where
the goal is to create intelligent robots by allowing them to go
through a developmental process, rather than being directly programmed
to solve a particular task. By endowing a robot with an appropriate
control architecture and adaptive mechanisms, it can learn through
interactions with the world, developing its own knowledge about itself
and its environment.
Selected Papers
- Experimental Evidence
that Empowerment May Drive Exploration in Sparse-Reward
Environments co-authored with Francesco Massari, Martin Biehl,
and Ryota Kanai, Proceedings of the IEEE International
Conference on Development and Learning, in Bejing, China,
August 2021.
- Developing Grounded Goals
through Instant Replay Learning co-authored with Douglas
Blank, Seventh Joint IEEE International Conference on Development
and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics in Lisbon, Portugal,
September 2017.
- A Developmental Robotics
Manifesto co-authored with Douglas Blank and James
Marshall, IEEE CIS Newsletter on Cognitive and Developmental
Systems, Volume 14, Spring 2017.
- Curiosity: Emergent
behavior through interacting multi-level predictions
and poster
co-authored with Douglas Blank and James Marshall. Presented at the
Workshop Designing for Curiosity held in conjunction with the
Conference Computer Human Interaction in Denver, CO, May
2017.
- Book
Review of Angelo Cangelosi and Matthew Schlesinger: Developmental
Robotics in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines,
Volume 16, Issue 3, 2015.
-
A support program for introductory CS
courses that improves student performance and retains students from
underrepresented groups, co-authored with Tia
Newhall, Andy Danner, Ameet Soni, Frances Ruiz, and Richard Wicentowski. Proceedings of Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education, 2014.
-
Category-Based Intrinsic
Motivation, co-authored with Rachel Lee, Ryan Walker, and James
Marshall. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on
Epigenetic Robotics, 2009.
- Editorial: Introduction to
Developmental Robotics, co-authored with Douglas
Blank. Connection Science, Volume 18, Number 2, 2006.
- Bringing up robot: Fundamental
mechanisms for creating a self-motivating, self-organizing
architecture, co-authored with Douglas Blank, Deepak Kumar, and
James Marshall. Cybernetics and Systems, Volume 36, Number 2,
2005.
- An emergent framework for
self-motivation in developmental robotics, co-authored with James
Marshall and Douglas Blank, presented at The Third International
Conference on Development and Learning, 2004.
- Heterogeneity in the
coevolved behaviors of mobile robots: The emergence of
specialists, co-authored with Mitchell Potter and Alan Schultz,
Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001.
- REAPER: A Reflexive
Architecture for Perceptive Agents, co-authored with Bruce
Maxwell, Nii Saka Addo, Paul Dickson, Nathaniel Fairfield, Nik
Johnson, Edward Jones, Suor Kim, Pukar Malla, Matthew Murphy, Brandon
Rutter, and Eli Silk, AI Magazine, volume 22, number 1, 2001.
- Nature versus Nurture in Evolutionary
Computation: Balancing the Roles of the Training Environment and the
Fitness Function in Producing Behavior, co-authored with Jordan
Wales and Jesse Wells, GECCO Late Breaking Paper, 2000.
- Integrating Robotics
Research with Undergraduate Education, co-authored with Bruce
Maxwell, Special Issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems, edited by
Robin Murphy, volume 15, number 6, 2000.
- Trends in Evolutionary
Robotics, co-authored with Deepak Kumar, Soft Computing for
Intelligent Robotic Systems, edited by L.C. Jain and T. Fukuda,
Physica-Verlag, New York, NY, pages 215-233, 1998.
- Bridging the gap between robot
simulations and reality with improved models of sensor noise,
Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Genetic
Programming, edited by Koza, J.R, et. al., Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers, San Francisco, CA, pages 824-831, 1998.
- A Hybrid Connectionist and
BDI Architecture for Modeling Embedded Rational Agents,
co-authored with Deepak Kumar, presented at the Workshop on
Cognitive Robotics, AAAI Fall Symposium Series at MIT, October,
1998.
- Learning in autonomous robots: A
summary of the 1996 Robolearn Workshop, co-authored with Henry
Hexmoor, Knowledge Engineering Review, Volume 11, Issue
4, 1997.
- An incremental approach to developing
intelligent neural network controllers for robots, IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B:
Cybernetics, Volume 26, Number 3, pages 474-485, 1996.
- Towards planning: Incremental
investigations into adaptive robot control, unpublished
dissertation done under the guidance of Mike Gasser at Indiana
University, 1994.
- Emergent control and planning
in an autonomous vehicle, co-authored with Gary McGraw and Doug
Blank, Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Hillsdale, NJ, pages 735-740, 1993.
- Exploring the symbolic/subsymbolic
continuum: A case study of RAAM, co-authored with Doug Blank and
James Marshall, The Symbolic and Connectionist Paradigms: Closing
the Gap, edited by J. Dinsmore, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Hillsdale, NJ, pages 113-148, 1992.
Past courses
- Mini course on AI for faculty and staff (Summer 2024), sponsored by Swarthmore College's Teaching and Learning Commons.
- Summer Scholars Program (2023, 2018)
- CS19/PHIL27 Ethics and Technology (S24)
- CS21 Introduction to Computer Science (F20, S20, S18, S16, F14, F10, S08)
- CS21B Intro to CS: Applications in Biology (S11, S10)
- CS35 Data Structures and Algorithms (F23, S23, F21, F18, S18[lab], F09)
- CS37 The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (S06)
- CS63 Artificial Intelligence
(S24[lab],
F22,
S22,
F19,
S19,
S16,
S15,
F13,
F11,
F07,
F05)
- CS75 Compiler Construction (S11, S07)
- CS81 Adaptive Robotics
(F17,
F15,
S14,
S12,
S10,
S09,
S08,
S06,
S03)
- COGS1 Introduction to Cognitive Science (S07)
Grants