Fully funded PhD Studentship
Building a Bee Brain Simulation
Supervisors: Dr. Chrisantha Fernando & Prof. Lars Chittka, Queen Mary University of London
Start September 2012
Outline
Build a simulation of an insect brain to explain how bees perceive the world and learn about their
environment. It’s more than just a bee flight simulator; you will design its “auto-pilot” brain
capable of learning to forage for food, learning to use landmarks for navigation, and explain
phenomena of complex cognition in bees. This is a rare opportunity to tightly couple software
engineering skills with real biological experiments in the same lab.
Technical Description
Bees have fascinating behavioural and learning capacities, living in tightly organised societies that
feature division of labour, symbolic communication, and cognitive capacities on a par with
‘higher’ vertebrates – how do they do all this with a tiny brain? In this ambitious joint Biology and
Computer Science PhD you will program a simulation of a bee in an environment to explain how
such behaviour could be mediated by a miniature brain in situated and embodied tasks. The
simulated bee will have a visual system and a motor system, and will fly in a 3D environment. The
simulation must be reconfigurable to various levels of abstraction allowing modelling of functions
such as ‘concept learning’, reinforcement learning, landmark learning etc, as well as lower level
visually based flight functions, and purely reactive obstacle avoidance functions. It will allow
testing of various controllers, e.g. spiking neuronal networks, continuous time recurrent neural
networks, computer vision algorithms, cognitive architectures, etc… You will use this simulator to
propose new experiments that will be conducted within the group to test your predictions.
The simulator will be built according to best practices in software engineering in order to be
reusable and extendible. Also the intention is to make the software available on the web and in
schools so that users can design their own controllers, therefore it should be possible to rapidly
prototype controllers using an easy to use graphical user interface. It is crucial that the controller
can be specified at any level from that of a cognitive architecture such as the subsumption
architecture sometimes used in robotics to a neuronal network model with synaptic plasticity rules.
In addition, in silico evolution techniques should be available within the software for optimization
of these controllers.
You will need to be an excellent programmer already, fluent in Java and C/C++, as these will be
the languages in which you will be the lead in design and programming of the simulator. Some
experience of neural networks and simulation or computer vision may be helpful. You should
have a strong interest in computational biology, although you need not have any formal biology
training, as this will be provided ‘on the job’.
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Applications are invited for a PhD Studentship starting in September 2012 to undertake research
in the area of computational neuroethology of bees. The studentship is based at the School of
Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London and will be
supervised by Dr Chrisantha Fernando
(http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ctf20/dphil_2005/index.htm) and Prof. Lars Chittka
http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/
Candidates should have a first degree or equivalent in Computer Science or Biology. They should
have excellent programming skills, be able to work closely with experimental biologists and learn
skills in machine learning and neural networks.
The studentship will cover student fees and a tax-free stipend starting at £15,590 per annum and is
available to candidates of all nationalities.
Informal enquiries can be made by email to Dr Chrisantha Fernando (ctf20@eecs.qmul.ac.uk) or
Prof. Lars Chittka (l.chittka@qmul.ac.uk)
Information about the school and its research areas can be found at www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk; more
details of the bee group can be found at http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/
To apply please email the following documents to Dr. Chrisantha Fernando
(ctf20@eecs.qmul.ac.uk): a completed application form, a CV listing all publications, your
representative publications in PDF format, 3 reference letters, a research statement and
other relevant documents as requested (see www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/apply/). These
documents must also be submitted online following the instructions given in the link.
The closing date for the applications is 31/01/12.
Interviews are expected to take place during w/c 6/02/12.