Distinguished Professor Frank Jackson

world leading Philosopher of Mind

Professor Jackson is responsible for the “Mary’s Room” thought experiment; one of the most famous in the philosophy of mind. It was intended to show that qualia, the ‘feely’ aspects of our experience, can’t be explained by physicalism. This is sometimes known as The Knowledge Argument.

He currently holds appointments at both the Australian National University and Princeton University, making contributions to philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language and meta-ethics.

Professor Jackson received the Order of Australia in 2006 for contributions to philosophy and the social sciences and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

World champion soccer playing robots

The University of Newcastle’s NUbots team develops software for robotic soccer and competes every year in the international RoboCup competition. The they won the world title in both 2006 and 2008.

RoboCup is an international research and education initiative. Its goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies and concepts can be integrated and examined in comparison to other teams, including robot vision, robot learning, biped motor control, localisation, world modelling, behaviour, and human-robot interaction.

The ultimate goal of the RoboCup initiative is “By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team”.