Joris Bleys VUB Homepage

Contact

Joris Bleys
jorisb@arti.vub.ac.be
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Free University of Brussels
Pleinlaan 2
1050 Brussels
Office: ++32 2 629 37 23
Mobile: ++32 486 48 11 51

Research

My main research interest is the emergence of communication systems in populations of grounded agents. This involves a wide range of different components (depicted in the semiotic cycle below) which should not be investigated in isolation, because this allows one to easily discard some complications thinking the other components will have to solve this, but rather all at once. Most of my research attention was received by two of these components (without ignoring the other components): conceptualization and the production and parsing of such a conceptualization into language.

The Semiotic Cycle

The origins and coordination of color categories is one of the main topics I have investigated. In my experiments the agents had to agree both on the perceptual categories they use to divide the complete spectrum of colors and on the words they use for expressing these categories. These experiments have shown that language is capable of coordinating the location of the perceptual categories. You can find a movie in which you can see the evolution of the colour categories in an artificial population here (20MB mpg).

Another idea that we are pursuing is the idea of cognitive semantics. This is an old idea which states that the meaning of a sentence is a progam the speaker wants the hearer to interpret. I have used the Incremental Recruitment Language (IRL) framework to generate these kind of programs which are then uttered in a grammatical language using Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). I have been looking into the problem of expressing these semantic programs in language and parsing a grammatical utterance into such a program and how such mappings between programs and language can get conventionalised in a population of agents.

Publications

Journal papers

2009

  • Tony Belpaeme and Joris Bleys
    The Impact of Statistical Distributions on Colour Categories
    Journal of Cognitive Science, 10(1), 1-20
    citation data

2005

  • Tony Belpaeme and Joris Bleys
    Explaining Universal Color Categories Through a Constrained Acquisition Process
    Adaptive Behavior, 13(4), 293-310.
    citation data

Chapters in books

2007

  • Tony Belpaeme and Joris Bleys
    Language, Perceptual Categories and their Interaction: Insights from Computational Modelling
    In C. Lyon & C. Nehaniv & A. Cangelosi (Eds.) Emergence of Communication and Language (p. 339-353). London: Springer-Verlag.
    website   citation data

Proceedings of conferences

2010

  • Joachim De Beule en Joris Bleys
    Self-Organization and Emergence in Language, a case study for color
    In: Proceedings of the Eighth Evolution of Language Conference (EVOLANG8).
    website

2009

2008

  • Joris Bleys
    Expressing Second Order Semantics and the Emergence of Recursion
    In: Proceedings of Seventh Evolution of Language Conference (EVOLANG7). World Scientific, Signapore.
    available   citation data   website

2007

2006

  • Joris Bleys
    Next-generation Language Games: The Guessing Game Revisited
    In: Proceedings of the 18th Belgium-Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC'06).
    available  citation data

2005

  • Luc Steels and Joris Bleys
    Planning What to Say: Second Order Semantics for Fluid Construction Grammars
    In: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA'05). Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
    available citation data
  • Tony Belpaeme and Joris Bleys
    Colourful Language and Colour Categories
    In: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication (EELC'05).
    available citation data

Internal papers

2008

  • Martin Loetzsch, Pieter Wellens, Joachim De Beule, Joris Bleys and Remi van Trijp
    The Babel2 manual
    AI-Memo 01-08, Aritficial Intelligence Laboratory, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
    available

Abstracts

2010

  • Joris Bleys
    Coordination of Language Strategies based on Communicative Fitness
    In: Proceedings of the Eighth Evolution of Language Conference (EVOLANG8).
    website

2006

  • Tony Belpaeme and Joris Bleys
    The subtle Interplay between Language and Category Acquisition and How it Explains the Universality of Colour Categories
    In: Proceedings of Sixth Evolution of Language Conference (EVOLANG6). World Scientific, Signapore.
    available

2005

  • Joris Bleys and Tony Belpaeme
    Explaining Universal Colour Categories through a Constrained Acquisition Process
    In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Belgium-Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC'05). Universa Press, Wetteren, Belgium.
    available

Talks, Attended Conferences and Other Activities

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

Education

Over the most recent years, I have been the teaching assistant of the following courses:

2009-2010

2008-2009

2007-2008

2006-2007

2005-2006

2004-2005

The Past

I received a MSc in Computer Science in 2004 from the Vrije Univeriseit Brussel (VUB), Belgium and I have a strong interest in Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. The topic of my Master's thesis was the cultural propagation of colour categories. In 2005 I completed an extra year in Computer Science (Master after Master).


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