(12 or 24 point) A./Prof. David Dowe Rating and ranking players and teams using MML Ratings are used in chess, tennis, golf, other sports, etc. in order to rank both teams and individual players. A variety of systems are used to do the ratings and rankings - including Elo, Glicko and systems more concerned with prize money (over the past 12 months). We can re-visit and improve these systems using the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle (Wallace and Boulton, 1968)(Wallace and Freeman, 1987)(Wallace and Dowe, 1999a, which is the Computer Journal's most downloaded article)(Wallace, posthumous, 2005)(Comley and Dowe, 2005) to arrive at a comparatively simple model with an improved and near-optimal predictive accuracy on future games and contests. This project will require strong mathematics - calculus (partial derivatives, second-order partial derivatives, integration by parts, determinants of matrices, etc.), etc. References: CoDo2005 Comley, Joshua W. and D.L. Dowe (2005). Minimum Message Length, MDL and Generalised Bayesian Networks with Asymmetric Languages, Chapter 11 (pp265-294) in P. Gru:nwald, I. J. Myung and M. A. Pitt (eds.), Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Applications, M.I.T. Press, April 2005, ISBN 0-262-07262-9 [Final camera-ready copy submitted Oct. 2003.] Wall2005 Wallace, C.S. (2005) [posthumous], Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length, Springer, 2005, 432 pp., ISBN: 0-387-23795-X. WaBo1968 Wallace C.S. & Boulton, D.M., An Information Measure for Classification, Computer Journal, Vol.11, No.2, 1968, pp 185-194 WaDo1999a Wallace, C.S. and D.L. Dowe (1999a). Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity, Computer Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp270-283. [This is the Computer Journal's most downloaded article.] WaFr1987 Wallace C.S., Freeman.P.R., Estimation and Inference by Compact Coding, The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, Methodology, 49, 3, 1987, pp 240-265 (24 point) A./Prof. David Dowe Econometric, statistical and financial time series modelling using MML Time series are sequences of values of one or more variables. They are much studied in finance, econometrics, statistics and various branches of science (e.g., meteorology, etc.). Minimum Message Length (MML) inference (Wallace and Boulton, 1968) (Wallace and Freeman, 1987)(Wallace and Dowe, 1999a)(Wallace, posthumous, 2005)(Comley and Dowe, 2005) has previously been applied to autoregressive (AR) time series (Fitzgibbon et al., 2004), other time series (Schmidt et al., 2005) and (at least in preliminary manner) both AR and Moving Average (MA) time series (Sak et al., 2005). In this project, we apply MML to the Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) model, in which the (standard deviations and) variances also vary with time. Depending upon progress, we can move on to the GARCH (Generalised ARCH) model or Peiris's Generalised Autoregressive (GAR) models, or to inference of systems of differential equations. This project will require strong mathematics - calculus (partial derivatives, second-order partial derivatives, integration by parts, determinants of matrices, etc.), etc. References: CoDo2005 Comley, Joshua W. and D.L. Dowe (2005). Minimum Message Length, MDL and Generalised Bayesian Networks with Asymmetric Languages, Chapter 11 (pp265-294) in P. Gru:nwald, I. J. Myung and M. A. Pitt (eds.), Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Applications, M.I.T. Press, April 2005, ISBN 0-262-07262-9 [Final camera-ready copy submitted Oct. 2003.] FiDV2004 Fitzgibbon, L.J., D. L. Dowe and F. Vahid (2004). Minimum Message Length Autoregressive Model Order Selection. In M. Palanaswami et al. (eds.), International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing (ICISIP), Chennai, India, 4-7 January 2004 (ISBN: 0-7803-8243-9, IEEE Catalogue Number: 04EX783), pp439-444 SaDR2005 M Sak, D Dowe, and S Ray: Minimum Message Length Moving Average Time Series Data Mining, Proceedings of the First Int Conf. Computational Intelligence: Methods and Applications, Istanbul, Turkey, Dec. 15-17, 2005, 6 pages ScPL2005 D F Schmidt, A P Paplinski and G S Lowe: Adaptive Control of Hydraulic Systems with MML Inferred RBF Networks, Proc. 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2005), Barcelona, Spain, IEEE, Barcelona, Spain, ISBN: 0-7803-8915-8, pp 2379-2385 Wall2005 Wallace, C.S. (2005) [posthumous], Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length, Springer, 2005, 432 pp., ISBN: 0-387-23795-X. WaBo1968 Wallace C.S. & Boulton, D.M., An Information Measure for Classification, Computer Journal, Vol.11, No.2, 1968, pp 185-194 WaDo1999a Wallace, C.S. and D.L. Dowe (1999a). Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity, Computer Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp270-283. [This is the Computer Journal's most downloaded article.] WaFr1987 Wallace C.S., Freeman.P.R., Estimation and Inference by Compact Coding, The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, Methodology, 49, 3, 1987, pp 240-265 (24 point) A./Prof. David Dowe Using MML to infer language history, evolution and relation to DNA The evolution of human languages raises several interesting issues, such as how languages evolve, how the evolution of spoken language relates to the evolution of written language, how it is that geographical regions of related languages can surround one or more regions of languages not related, how populations of language speakers migrated eons ago and how spoken language relates to DNA. Study of this area also helps with the inference of now-extinct ancestral languages and at least indirectly with the preservation of dying languages. The project will use the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle (Wallace and Boulton, 1968) (Wallace and Freeman, 1987)(Wallace and Dowe, 1999a)(Wallace, posthumous, 2005) (Comley and Dowe, 2005), building upon earlier work in (Ooi and Dowe, 2005). The project will require strong mathematics - calculus (partial derivatives, second-order partial derivatives, integration by parts, determinants of matrices, etc.), etc. References: CoDo2005 Comley, Joshua W. and D.L. Dowe (2005). Minimum Message Length, MDL and Generalised Bayesian Networks with Asymmetric Languages, Chapter 11 (pp265-294) in P. Gru:nwald, I. J. Myung and M. A. Pitt (eds.), Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Applications, M.I.T. Press, April 2005, ISBN 0-262-07262-9 [Final camera-ready copy submitted Oct. 2003.] OoDo2005 Ooi, J.N. and D. L. Dowe, Inferring Phylogenetic Graphs of Natural Languages using Minimum Message Length, Proc. CAEPIA 2005 (11th Conf. of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence), Vol. 1, pp I:143 - I:152, Nov. 2005; ISBN 84-96474-13-5 Wall2005 Wallace, C.S. (2005) [posthumous], Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length, Springer, 2005, 432 pp., ISBN: 0-387-23795-X. WaBo1968 Wallace C.S. & Boulton, D.M., An Information Measure for Classification, Computer Journal, Vol.11, No.2, 1968, pp 185-194 WaDo1999a Wallace, C.S. and D.L. Dowe (1999a). Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity, Computer Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp270-283. [This is the Computer Journal's most downloaded article.] WaFr1987 Wallace C.S., Freeman.P.R., Estimation and Inference by Compact Coding, The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, Methodology, 49, 3, 1987, pp 240-265 (24 point) A./Prof. David Dowe Recognising, communicating with & quantifying varieties of intelligence ``Intelligence'' is a term used variably to describe a variety of human aptitudes (memory, mathematical ability, ability to make inductive inferences), terrestrial non-human aptitudes and (www.SETI.org) something sought in extra-terrestrials. Humans share much with other humans and share at least a planet with terrestrial non-humans, but how much - if anything - must humans share with extra-terrestrials or one extra-terrestrial with another? Dowe and Hajek (1997, 1998) discuss the relevance of the information-theoretic Minimum Message Length (MML) principle (Wallace and Boulton, 1968)(Wallace and Freeman, J. Royal Stat. Soc, 1987) (Wallace and Dowe, 1999a)(Wallace, 2005) to the inductive inference part of intelligence, and Hernandez-Orallo and Minaya-Collado (1998) discuss the relevance of Kolmogorov complexity to intelligence - and MML is intimately related to Kolmogorov complexity (Wallace and Dowe, 1999a) (Wallace, 2005). This project concerns the use of information theory, MML and Kolmogorov complexity to recognise signs of intelligence (``There's life, Jim, but not as we know it'') and ways of communicating with it. This will inevitably entail measuring - or attempting to measure - the intelligence. Another direction in which the project might head is to study how intelligence of a system increases (or possibly doesn't increase) when there is communication involving more than one intelligent entity. The project might also involve the study of communications between terrestrial non-humans such as, e.g., marmosets and dolphins, etc. The project will require strong mathematics. References: CoDo2005 Comley, Joshua W. and D.L. Dowe (2005). Minimum Message Length, MDL and Generalised Bayesian Networks with Asymmetric Languages, Chapter 11 (pp265-294) in P. Gru:nwald, I. J. Myung and M. A. Pitt (eds.), Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Applications, M.I.T. Press, April 2005, ISBN 0-262-07262-9 [Final camera-ready copy submitted Oct. 2003.] DoHa1997 D. L. Dowe, A. R. Hajek (1997), "A computational extension to the Turing Test", Technical Report #97/322, Dept Computer Science, Monash University, Melbourne, 9pp, 1997 DoHa1998 D L Dowe and A R Hajek (1998). A non-behavioural, computational extension to the Turing Test, pp101-106, Proc. International Conf. on Computational Intelligence & Multimedia Applications (ICCIMA'98), Gippsland, Australia, February 1998 HOMC1998 Hernandez-Orallo, J. and Minaya-Collado, N.: A Formal Definition of Intelligence Based on an Intensional Variant of Kolmogorov Complexity (English, 18 pp.), Proc. International Symposium of Engineering of Intelligent Systems (EIS'98) ICSC Press 1998, pp 146-163 Wall2005 Wallace, C.S. (2005) [posthumous], Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length, Springer, 2005, 432 pp., ISBN: 0-387-23795-X. WaBo1968 Wallace C.S. & Boulton, D.M., An Information Measure for Classification, Computer Journal, Vol.11, No.2, 1968, pp 185-194 WaDo1999a Wallace, C.S. and D.L. Dowe (1999a). Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity, Computer Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp270-283. [This is the Computer Journal's most downloaded article.] WaFr1987 Wallace C.S., Freeman.P.R., Estimation and Inference by Compact Coding, The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, Methodology, 49, 3, 1987, pp 240-265