I am currently working on my PhD in Computer Science at the Univeristy of Southern California. I am a member of the LDC/Crue research labs led by Prof. Paul Cohen.

Research Interests

My research interests are Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Right now I am especially interested in developmental natural language understanding. We are trying to accomplish this by developing Wubble World. Wubble World is an interactive game for 10-12 year olds. Children interact with each other and with their pet wubble. These interactions are stored off generating a sentence-scene corpus for developmental language learning.

I also am working on a war simulation game that will hopefully demonstrate different physical traits of ancient battlefields. The tactics needed to successfully operate in this environment should be those outlined in Clausewitz's classic "On War".

I am also interested in different forms of swarm intelligence.

Education

• PhD, Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA
• GPA: 4.0
• Completion Date (estimated): May 2009
• M.S. in Computer Science, 2005, University of Wyoming, Laramie
• B.S. in Computer Science, 2001, Kansas State University, Manhattan

Publications

Thesis

W.Kerr.  Physics-Based Multiagent Swarms and Their Application to Coverage Problems.  University of Wyoming.  2005

2007

W. Kerr, S. Hoversten, D. Hewlett, P. Cohen and Y. Chang.  Learning in Wubble World.  International Conference on Development and Learning.  (accepted).

D. Hewlett, S. Hoversten, W. Kerr, P. Cohen, and Y. Chang.  Wubble World.  Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment.  2007

D. Spears, W. Kerr, and W. Spears.  Fluid-like swarms with predictable macroscopic behavior.  Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 4324

2006

Y. Chang, C. Morrison, W. Kerr, P. Cohen, and R. St. Amant.  The Jean System.  International Conference on Development and Learning.  2006.

D. Spears, W. Kerr, and W. Spears.  Physics-based robot swarms for coverage problems. International Journal on Intelligent Control and Systems, 11(3).

2005

W. Kerr and D. Spears (to appear).  Robotic Simulation of Gases For a Surveillance Task.  In Proceedings IROS'05.  2005

W. Spears, D. Zarzhitsky, S. Hettiarachchi, W. Kerr.  Strategies for Multi-Asset Surveillance.  IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control, 2005, 929-934.

Hettiarachchi S., Spears W., Green D., and Kerr W., Distributed Agent Evolution with Dynamic Adaptation to Local Unexpected Scenarios. Proceedings of the 2005 Second GSFC/IEEE Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts.

2004

Spears, W., D. Spears, R. Heil, W. Kerr, and S. Hettiarachchi (in press).  An overview of physicomimetics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, State-of-the-Art Series, Volume 3342.

W. Kerr, D. Spears, W. Spears, and D. Thayer. Two Formal Fluids Models For Multiagent Sweeping and Obstacle Avoidance.  Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3228. Springer-Verlag, 2004