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DYLAN EVANS:
CURRENT INTERESTS
My interests are wide-ranging:
EMOTION: In my PhD thesis, and in my
first post-doc at King's College London, I
explored the psychological literature that investigates the way in
which emotions help and hinder the decision-making process. In
particular, I developed a view of emotions as heuristics that
constrain the possible range of outcomes considered during the
decision-making process. In other words, emotions may serve to
render salient only a tiny proportion of the available alternatives
and of the conceivably relevant facts. Thus they winnow down to
manageable size the number of considerations relevant to
deliberation.
I
later went on to write computer models which attempted to expand the
rational-choice theory of decision-making by including elements of
real human decision-making, such as motivational bias. For example,
during my second post-doc, at the University of Bath, I constructed
a multi-agent based model in which
agents that incorporated emotional
factors into their decision-making processes outperformed those that
did not.
I'm now looking at how this understanding of the role of emotion in
decision-making can be used to build better decision-support
systems: that, is, computers that help people make
decisions. I'm doing this at the Cork Constraint Computation
Centre, in the Department of Computer Science at University College
Cork.
EVOLUTION &
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: I am fascinated by the process of
natural selection, and especially the light that Darwin's theory can
throw on the workings of the human mind. I have written
introductions to evolution and to evolutionary psychology, and am
interested in the possibility of testing evolutionary psychology
hypotheses by computer simulations - a research program I call "synthetic evolutionary psychology".
ROBOTICS: During
my tenure as Senior Lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the
University of the West of England, I
developed artificial models of emotion and conducted research on
human-robot interaction. The models of emotion were intended to help
robots make decisions in ways similar to those employed by humans.
GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISK:
In 2006-7
I led a project investigating
the possibility that global civilisation may
collapse
within the new few decades. To discover what life might be
life in the aftermath of global
collapse, I set up a simulation in which volunteers lived as if there
had been a major failure of national infrastructure. I am
currently in the process of writing up this research.
This page was last updated: 5 January 2008.
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