Alan Winfield's Web Log

When I was a boy the term consumer electronics didn't exist. Then the sum total of household electronics was a wireless , a  radiogram ...

Last week my PhD student Mehmet started a new series of experiments in embodied behavioural evolution. The exciting new step is that we...

My first encounter with Philip Larkin was as a fresher in October 1974. As university librarian it was Larkin's annual duty to give an i...

Just spent an awesomely busy weekend at the Science Museum, demonstrating Swarm Robotics. We were here as part of the Robotville exhibition ...

Here are the slides for the IET public lecture I gave in Sheffield on 2 September 2011 on the final day of the conference Towards Autonomou...

This is me discussing robot ethics with Dallas Campbell for BBC1's Bang Goes The Theory . I outline the five new ethical principles for ...

You are technically literate, an engineer or scientist perhaps with a particular interest in robotics, but you've been stranded on a des...

This blog post could well turn out to be to be the most boring I've ever written - but I think it's important. I want to write about...

A few weeks ago I gave an  Ignite Bristol talk on the Artificial Culture project. It's just been posted on YouTube here:

A few days ago, at the excellent HowTheLightGetsIn festival, I took part in a panel debate called Rise of the Machines. Here was the brief:...

Here is the poster we presented at last week's excellent Future Emerging Technologies conference in Budapest :

Well it's taken awhile, but the draft revised 'laws of robotics' have now been published. New Scientist article Roboethics for H...

Just spent 4 days at the beautiful Schloss Dagstuhl in SW Germany attending a seminar on Artificial Immune Systems . The Dagstuhl is a rema...

A few weeks ago I spent a very enjoyable Saturday at the Northern Arts and Science Network annual conference Dialogues , in Leeds. The morn...

In future if anyone wants to know what I think - about almost anything scientific and quite alot else - all I have to do is point them to my...

I have a dilemma and it is this. I'm torn between lusting after an iPad 2 and serious worries over the ethics of its manufacture . The...

One of the challenges of the artificial culture project that we knew we would face from the start is that of making sense of the free runnin...

A friend has asked me to check out her Aibo robot dog, called Max. Here he is: Cute eh? He's an early ERS-210 model. Charges up ok, ...

We're all very excited because FIRA (the Federation of International Robot soccer Association), which runs an annual competition for ro...

Four short months and 135 tweets ago I wrote about joining Twitter . Slightly reluctant, confused by how it worked and - if I'm complete...