AUT - Wai Kiang (Albert) Yeap

Professor Wai Kiang (Albert) Yeap

Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Director of CAIR

Phone: +64 9 921 9999 extn 9565

Email: wai.yeap@aut.ac.nz

Physical Address:
AUT Tower, Level 1,
2 – 14 Wakefield St,
Auckland 1010

Postal Address:
SCMS (D-75)
Auckland University of Technology
Private Bag 92006,
Auckland 1142 NZ

Qualifications:

• BSc (Hons.) in Computer System, University of Essex, 1978.
• PhD in Artificial Intelligence, University of Essex, 1984.

Memberships and Affiliations:

• Fellow of the New Zealand Computer Society (NZCS).
• Member of the American Association of AI.
• Member of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
• Steering committee member of the Pacific Rim International Conference on AI.

Biography:

Professor Yeap is passionate about his work on artificial intelligence research and would be pleased to talk to anyone regarding his notion of an intelligent machine (see his fourth publication below).

Teaching Areas:

• Artificial Intelligence

Research Summary:

Professor Yeap has conducted research in many fields, including: inexact reasoning, medical expert systems, cognitive maps/robotics, vision, intelligent tutoring systems, natural language, concept formation and mind research.

Research Partners

• Pingar Limited
• Spatial Learning Network funded by NSF & located at Temple University, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania.

Research Funding

• Pre-Seed Accelerator Funds (PSAF) - $270,000 from Aug 2009 - Aug 2010.

Current Research Projects:

Professor Yeap is currently focusing on:

• Testing his theory of large-scale space perception using an autonomous mobile robot. See publications 2-3, 9-11.
• Developing a new computational theory of how language works. See publication 6.
• Identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for any computational systems to have original intentionality. See publication 7.
• Developing new technologies from his basic research.

Publications:

• Jefferies, M.E. and Yeap, W.K. (eds.) Tobotics and Cognitive Approaches to Spatial Mapping, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (2008)
• Wong, C.K., Schmidt, J. and Yeap, W.K. Using a Mobile Robot for Cognitive Mapping. Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2243 – 2248 (2007)
• Schmidt, J., Wong, C.K. and Yeap, W.K. A Split & Merge Approach to Metric-Topological Mao-Building. Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Volume 3, 1069-1072 (2006)
• Yeap, W.K. and Jefferies, M. On early cognitive mapping. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 2: 85-116 (2000).
• Yeap, W.K. and Jefferies, M. Computing a representation of the local environment. Artificial Intelligence, 107: 219-263 (1999).
• Yeap, W.K. A sketched computational theory of language comprehension. In Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference. Madison, USA, (1998), 1170-1175.
• Yeap, W.K. Emperor AI, Where is your new mind? AI Magazine 18, 4:137-144 (1997).
• Lam, F.C. and Yeap, W.K. Bayesian updating: On the interpretation of exhaustive and mutually exclusive assumptions. Artificial Intelligence 53:245-254 (1992).
• Yeap, W.K., Jefferies, M. and Naylor, P.S. An MFIS for computing a raw cognitive map. Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on AI. Sydney, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. (1991) 373-378.
• Yeap, W.K. and Handley, C.C. Four important issues in cognitive mapping. In J. Meyer & S.W. Wilson (eds.) From Animals to Animats. Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press (1991) 176-183.
• Yeap, W.K. Towards a computational theory of cognitive maps. Artificial Intelligence 34: 297-360 (1988).