research
My research is motivated by what I call "the crown molding problem." My wife and I were once inside a building, and she pointed out that the crown molding was beautiful. I looked up and realized that I had never seen crown molding before. Surely it had fallen on my retina many times before, but I had never "seen" it. After that point, I saw crown molding everywhere. I had gained a new feature of the world that allowed me to make value judgements and predictions about the age and quality of construction of buildings. My research goal is to model this process with artificial agents.
me
I am currently a PhD student working with Benjamin Kuipers in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at UT Austin. My expected graduation date is summer 2010.
Contact me at jmugan@cs.utexas.edu.