Professor Philippe Pasquier

Philippe Pasquier, Ph.D. is assistant professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology of Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Communication, Arts, and Technology.
 
There Philippe is conducting both a scientific and artistic research agenda. His research focuses on building deeper theories for endowing machines with autonomous behaviors, with a focus on creative and artistic applications. Since his arrival at SIAT, he has been conducting research along three directions which are in synergy.
 
1. Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Sciences
His main contributions in the broad field of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive sciences, have been in the area of artificial agents and multi-agent systems, cognitive modeling, agent communication and automated negotiation. In particular, recent work includes: (1) interest-based negotiation, a novel approach that advocates that parties can increase the likelihood and quality of an agreement by exchanging information about their underlying goals and alternative ways to achieve them and (2) coherentist approach to agent and society design.
 
2. Computational Creativity and Computer Entertainment
A second stream of research has emerged from the blend between art and science present at SIAT. Metacreation is the idea of endowing machines with creative behavior (as opposed to problem-solving intelligence). At the fundamental level, it raises the question of the formalization and modeling of creativity which is relevant to both AI and cognitive sciences. At the applied level, it aims to endow machines with creative autonomous behavior to meet a growing demand from the creative industries.
 
3. Artistic Creation and Administration
In parallel to these two streams of research, Philippe is pursuing his artistic production in computer music, sound design, audio and media arts. He is (or has been) serving as an active member and administrator of several artistic collectives (Robonom, Phylm, MIJI), art centers (Avatar, Bus Gallery), and artistic organizations (P: Media art, Machines, Vancouver New Music) in Europe, Canada, and Australia.
 
His papers include Modelling Flexible Social Commitments and their Enforcement, The Cognitive Coherence Approach for Agent Communication Pragmatics, On the Benefits of Exploiting Underlying Goals in Argument-based Negotiation, Argumentation and Persuasion in the Cognitive Coherence Theory, Towards a Generic Framework for Automated Video Game Level Creation, An Empirical Study of Interest-based Negotiation, and Conversational Semantics with Social Commitments.
 
Philippe earned his Bachelor in computer science (Licence Erasmus), with an option in Graphic Systems, with distinction (major) at UCL (Louvain-la-Neuve Catholic University), Belgium in 1998. He earned his Master in computer science with an option in Computational Linguistics at Nantes Science University, France in 1999. He earned his Ph.D in Computer Sciences (Artificial Intelligence) at the DAMAS [Dialogue, Agent and Multi-AgentS] laboratory at Laval University, Québec, Canada in 2005.
 
Watch Arne Eigenfeldt and Philippe Pasquier, Musical Metacreation. Read Composing to a Different Drummer.