Welcome
… to the homepage of Malte Schilling. On this site, you can read about my current work, latest publications …
At the moment, I work at the ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) in Berkeley (California). The main objective of my work is to connect the low level representations of a simple robot control network to high level representations as used in language. Here, I work together with the Neural Theory of Language group and it is our goal to come up with a simple interactive agent which can be instructed through language and engage in simple dialogues.
I finished my PhD in January 2010. It is on a bottom-up approach on cognitive control. The thesis was written in the working group of Holk Cruse (Biological Cybernetics and Theoretical Biology) and deals on the one hand with the implementation of a biology-inspired control system for a hexapod robot. On the other hand, this system has been extended through grounded internal models which are used by the lower-level system for control of behaviour, but can now be additionally applied in a mental simulation for planning ahead. The internal body model as such has been realised as a neural network representing the body structure and its dynamics in a dual quaternion representation using the Mean of Multiple Computation principle (for details, see publications).
At the moment, I am applying the body model to the control network, enabling the whole system to use the model decoupled from the body in planning ahead. We are going to extend our minimal cognitive systems approach in such a way to include not only bottom-up grounding of internal models, but also to employ top-down influences governing the cognitive abilities as are given through communication – this is the Talking Stick project, a more detailed description can be found here.
