Research Interests

Ian Wood - a phd student at ANU
updated 18 March 2011
I am doing research on is social simulation. In a nutshell, trying to get a handle on the way a society (as in, millions of people) collectively 'think'. The dynamics if culture, opinion, belief etc... That's a pretty big area, with many very different aspects and approaches. What I'm working on is computational models that can capture at least some aspect of how such processes proceed. Again, that's pretty big, and our technology and knowledge is simply not up to tracking our societies in a particularly useful, even predictive way. There are many challenges, and it feels a lot like we are only nibbling at the edges. None the less, generally progress must be made at times by small steps, and I feel that there is hope for useful if not wholly predictive results.

My current work approaches the problem from 3 quite different directions:

Publications

2009

  1. Wood, I.; Larson, J. W. and Gardner, H. : A Vision and Agenda for Theory Provenance in Scientific Publishing. In Database Systems for Advanced Applications, pages 112-121, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. pdf.. 

2011

  1. Wood, I.; Sunehag, P. and Hutter, M. : (Non-) Equivalence of Universal Priors. In Solomonoff 85th Memorial Conference, 2011. pdf.. 
Feel free to contact me at ian.wood@anu.edu.au.