DYLAN EVANS:
CURRENT INTERESTS
My current research focuses on
risk intelligence
and decision making:
RISK INTELLIGENCE:
I think there is a special-purpose mental ability for
thinking about risk and uncertainty, which
I'm calling "risk intelligence". At the core of risk intelligence
is the ability to estimate
probabilities accurately. I have developed new software for
boosting risk intelligence and filed a patent application for this
software with the UK Intellectual Property Office on 6 October 2009
(application no. GB0917471.5). I have tested this software with my
students and the preliminary results are very encouraging. I have
also developed a new website together with my friend and colleague
Benjamin Jakobus for measuring risk intelligence - www.projectionpoint.com
Expert gamblers have unusually high levels of risk intellilgence. For
the past year, I have been conducting interviews with some of the most
successful gamblers in the world to learn more about
the way they think about risk. I presented my initial
findings at the Fourteenth
International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking in Lake Tahoe,
Nevada, in May 2009. I've summarised this paper in this short
video on YouTube.
I am also a member of the new joint
research project in risk management analytics involving University
College Cork and IBM.
The project will develop enhanced methods and tools to help the
manufacturing industry, healthcare organisations, and
government agencies manage risk more effectively.
DECISION MAKING: In
2008 I
set up the Health Decision Making Research Group (HDMRG) in the School
of
Medicine at University College Cork to foster interdsciplinary
collaborative research on decision making in health
contexts. The HDMRG has recentlly launched an ambitious programme
of research entitled Future Medical
Decisions. I
am particularly interested in the application
of expected utility theory to medical decision making.
*
* *
My previous research has
ranged from prediction markets,
emotion and evolutionary psychology to robotics and global catastrophic risk:
PREDICTION MARKETS:
In 2008 I teamed up with Intrade,
the world's leading prediction market
company, to investigate
possible uses of these markets to forecast key
indicators of public health in Ireland. This project was funded
by
an Innovation
Partnerships Feasibility Study Award from Enterprise Ireland.
This work has been featured in the Irish
Times and the Irish
Examiner and on the BBC
World Service (to listen, click here) and on RTE Radio 1 (to listen, click
here).
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. This theory fits well with the concept of emotional
intelligence. However, recently I have become more sceptical
of the concept of emotional intelligence, for reasons that I explain in
this
video clip.
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.
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 an innovative research 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: 1 January 2010.
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