Alan Winfield's Web Log

One of the oft quoted paradoxes of consciousness is that we are unable to observe or experience our own conscious minds at work; that we can...

I'm very excited to be leading a new project called euRathlon - which is short for European Robotics Athlon. Up until now the projec...

Here are the slides of my Bristol TEDx talk: My key take home messages from this talk are: Big transition happening now from industri...

About 6 years ago the late amazing Richard Gregory said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, "when your robots start telling each other s...

How can we measure self-awareness in artificial systems? This was a question that came up during a meeting of the Awareness project advis...

Last week at the Cheltenham Science Festival we debated the question Can robots think? It's not a new question. Here, for instance, is ...

I've blogged before about the Symbrion project: an ambitious 5-year project to build a swarm of independently mobile autonomous robots ...

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...