Home Page of Dr Peter Vamplew

Image of Peter Vamplew

I have been a Senior Lecturer within the Graduate School of ITMS at the University of Ballarat since December 2005. Previously I was a lecturer within the computing discipline at the University of Tasmania from 1991-2005.

I graduated from Flinders University of South Australia at the end of 1990 (B.A., B.Sc.(Hons) in Computer Science), and received my PhD from the University of Tasmania in 1996 - my thesis topic was the automated recognition of sign language using neural networks.

Phone: +61 3 5327 9616
Fax: +61 3 5327 9289
Email: p.vamplew@ballarat.edu.au

Teaching

My current teaching duties for 2010 are:

  • Computer Graphics and Animation Programming
  • Research Skills and Academic Communication
  • Computer Game Engines

I have teaching experience in the following areas:

  • Computer Graphics Programming
  • Computer Games Engines
  • Multimedia and Animation
  • Introductory Programming (Pascal/Modula-2/C/Java)
  • Algorithms and Software Metrics
  • Intelligent Systems
  • Interactive Instructional Design
  • Digital Image Processing
  • Computer Networks
  • Software Quality Assurance
  • Personal Software Process

Research

My research interests lie primarily in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly reinforcement learning, neural networks and evolutionary computation. I am currently researching variations on reinforcement learning algorithms for multi-objective problems. I am also the leader of the Data Mining and Informatics Research Group.

Grants

 

Investigators

Project title

Year

Funding Body

Value

Peter Vamplew

Computer recognition of Australian sign-language

1991

University of Tasmania, New Staff Priming Grant

$5000

Peter Vamplew and Julian Dermoudy

An anti-plagiarism editor for software development courses

2004

University of Tasmania, Teaching Development Grant

$4886

Peter Vamplew and John Yearwood

Improving Temporal Difference Approaches to Reinforcement Learning By Using Compiled Eligibility Traces

2007

University of Ballarat Early Career Researcher Grant

$9948

Nadezda Sukhorukova, Gleb Beliakov, Gang Li, Julien Ugon, Peter Vamplew, Phoebe Chen

Nonsmooth optimisation techniques for data pre-processing in sleep stage identification problems

2010

Deakin University – University of Ballarat Collaboration Fund

$20,000

Student supervision

I am currently supervising the following PhD and Masters students:

  • Armita Zarnegar: Discovering Gene Networks Using Memetic Algorithms
  • Cameron Foale: Improved Real-time Acoustics for Computer Games
  • Deanna Osman: Opinion Detection in Blogs for Market Research
  • Rosemary Torney: Applying Forensic Linguistics to Phishing Emails
  • Omaru Maruatona: Detecting Fraud in Online Banking Transactions

I have previously supervised the following successful PhD/Masters students:

  • Tim Freeman Application of Neural Network Classifiers to Electrocardiographic Body Surface Mapping (Masters, 1998)
  • Carl Lewis: The construction of training signals from incomplete information for use with sequential input classifiers (PhD, 1999)
  • Uwe Rosebrock: The influence of specific entry devices for navigation in virtual environments on the ability to gather spatial knowledge (Masters, 2000)
  • Jonathan Pugh: Multi-user virtual reality (Masters, 2001)
  • Robert Ollington: A Biologically-Inspired Model for Robot Navigation (PhD, 2007)
  • Mofakhural Islam: Unsupervised Colour Texture Segmentation Using Markov Random Fields (Masters, 2008)
  • Adam Berry: Escaping the Bounds of Generality - Unbounded Bi-Objective Optimisation (PhD, 2008)
  • Subhasis Mukherjee: Reinforcement Learning on the AIBO Robot (Masters, 2010)

Publications

Journal papers

  • Osman, D., Yearwood, J. and Vamplew, P., “Automated Opinion Detection: Implications of the Level of Agreement Between Human Raters”, Information Processing and Management (forthcoming)
  • Osman, D., Yearwood, J. and Vamplew, P. (2009), “Weblogs for Market Research: Finding More Relevant Opinion Documents using System Fusion”, in Journal of Online Information Review, Special Issue on Web Mining for E-Commerce and E-Services, 33(5), pp 873-888.
  • Kelarev, A., Yearwood, J. & Vamplew, P. (2009) A Polynomial Ring Construction For Classification of Data, Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society (forthcoming).
  • Johnson, D, Malhotra, V, & Vamplew, P (2006), "More Effective Web Search Using Bigrams and Trigrams." Webology, 3(4), Article 35.
  • Ollington, R and Vamplew, P, "Concurrent Q-Learning: Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Goals and Environments", International Journal of Intelligent Systems, Vol 20, Issue 10, October 2005, pp 1037-1052
  • Ollington, R and Vamplew, P, "A Supervised Neural Network Based on the Cerebellum", Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing Systems, Vol 6, No. 4, Summer 2000, pp242-248 (actually published in 2002)
  • Adams, A and Vamplew, P, "Encoding and Decoding Cyclic Data", The South Pacific Journal of Natural Science, Vol 16, 1998, pp. 54-58
  • Vamplew, P and Adams, A, "Recognition of Sign Language Gestures Using Neural Networks", Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing Systems, Vol 5, No. 2, Winter 1998, pp.94-102

Contributions to books

  • Ollington, R., Vamplew, P. and Swanson, J. (2009), “Incorporating Expert Advice into Reinforcement Learning Using Constructive Neural Networks”, in Franco, L., Elizondo, D. and Jerez, J.M. (eds), “Constructive Neural Networks”, Studies in Computational Intelligence Vol. 258, Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-04511-0, pp 207-224.
  • Vamplew, P, "Websites", in Cox, R, Russell, D and Vamplew, W, "The Encyclopedia of British Football", Frank Cass, 2002, pp 318-320
  • Vamplew, P, "Sign Language Recognition Using Virtual Reality Gloves" in Loeffler, CE and Anderson, T, "Virtual Reality Casebook", Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994, pp 123-126 [also published in Japanese as Loeffler, CE, "Virtual Realities: Anthology of Industry and Culture", Gijitsu Hyoron Sha, Tokyo, 1993, pp 210-214]

International conference papers

Australian conference papers

  • Sukhorukova, N., Stranieri, A., Ofoghi, B., Vamplew, P., Saleem, M., Ma, L.,  Ugon, A., Ugon, J.,  Muecke, N., Amiel, H., Philippe, C., Bani-Mustafa, A., Huda, S., Bertoli, M., Lévy, P., Ganascia, J-G (2010), Automatic sleep stage identification: difficulties and possible solutions, Proceedings of the Australian Computer Science Conference, January 2010, Gold Coast, Australia.
  • Webb, D., Yearwood, J., Vamplew, P., Ma, L.  Ofoghi, B. and Kelarev, A. (2009),  Applying Clustering and Ensemble Clustering Approaches to Phishing Profiling, The Australasian Data Mining Conference: AusDM 2009, Melbourne, Australia, December 2009.
  • Vamplew, P., Dazeley, R., Barker, E. and Kelarev, A. (2009), Constructing Stochastic Mixture Policies for Episodic Multiobjective Reinforcement Learning Tasks, Proceedings of AI09: The 22nd Australasian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Melbourne, Australia, December 2009, Springer, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Vol 5866.Zarnegar, A., Vamplew, P. and Stranieri, A., “Inference of Gene Expression Networks Using Memetic Gene Expression Programming”, Australian Computer Science Conference, 2009.
  • Vamplew, P., Yearwood, J., Dazeley, R. and Berry, A., (2008), On the Limitations of Scalarisation for Multiobjective Learning of Pareto Fronts, in Wobcke, W and Zhang, M (Eds), Proceedings of AI08: The 21st Australasian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Auckland, New Zealand, December 2008, Springer, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol 5360, ISBN 978-3-540-89377-6, pp 372-378
  • Layton, R., Vamplew, P., and Turville, C., (2008), Using Stereotypes to Improve Early-Match Poker Play, in Wobcke, W and Zhang, M (Eds), Proceedings of AI08: The 21st Australasian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Auckland, New Zealand, December 2008, Springer, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol 5360, ISBN 978-3-540-89377-6, pp 584-593Foale, C. and Vamplew, P., “Portal-based Sound Propagation for First-Person Computer Games” in Proceedings of the Fourth Australian Conference on Interactive Entertainment (IE2007), ISBN: 978-1-921166-87-7
  • Osman, D., Yearwood, J. and Vamplew, P., “Using Corpus Analysis to Inform Research into Opinion Detection in Blogs”, Proceedings of the 6th Australasian Data Mining Conference, Gold Coast, December 2007, CRPIT Volume 70, pp 65-75
  • Vamplew, P., Ollington, R. and Hepburn, M. (2006), Enhanced Temporal Difference Learning Using Compiled Eligibility Traces , Proceedings of AI06: The 19th Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hobart, Tasmania, 3-5 December 2006.
  • Vamplew, P and Ollington,R, "Global Versus Local Constructive Function Approximation for On-Line Reinforcement Learning", at AI'05: The 18th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Sydney, Australia, December 2005
  • Temby, L, Vamplew, P and Berry, A, " Accelerating Real-Valued Genetic Algorithms Using Mutation-With-Momentum", at AI'05: The 18th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Sydney, Australia, December 2005
  • Vamplew, P.W. and Dermoudy, J., An Anti-Plagiarism Editor for Software Development Courses, in Proceedings of the Australasian Computing Education Conference, Newcastle, Australia, January 2005.
  • Vamplew, P., Clark, D., Adams, A and Muench, J., "Techniques for Dealing with Missing Values in Feedforward Networks", in ACNN'96: Proceedings of the Seventh Australian Conference on Neural Networks, Canberra, 1996
  • Vamplew, P and Adams, A, "Neural Transplant Surgery: An Approach to Pre-training Recurrent Networks" at the Fifth Australian Conference on Neural Networks, University of Queensland, February 1994
  • Vamplew, P, "The SLARTI Sign Language Recognition System: A Progress Report" at the Australian Conference on Technology and People With Disabilities, Regency Park Centre for the Young Disabled, Adelaide, 5-7 July 1993
  • Bye, S, Adams, A and Vamplew, P, "The Self-Growing Feed-Forward Counterpropagation Network" at ACNN'93: The Fourth Australian Conference on Neural Networks, University of Melbourne, 1-3 February 1993
  • Vamplew, P and Adams, A, "Missing Values in a Backpropagation Neural Net" at ACNN'92: The Third Australian Conference on Neural Networks, Canberra, 3-5 February 1992
  • Adams, A, Bye, S, and Vamplew, P "A New Activation Function for the Backpropagation Neural Network" at DICTA-91 Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications, Melbourne, 4-6 December, 1991
  • Vamplew, P, "Computer Recognition of Sign Language" at Paper Clips to Silicon Chips: Second National Conference on Disability Issues and Technology, Hobart, 6-9 October 1991

Theses

Unrefereed publications

  • Miner, A.S., Vamplew, P., Windle, D.J., Flentje, P. and Warner, P., 2010. A comparative study of Various Data Mining techniques as applied to the modeling of Landslide susceptibility on the Bellarine Peninsula, Victoria, Australia. Geologically Active, Proceedings of the 11th IAEG Congress of the International Association of Engineering Geology and the Environment, Auckland, New Zealand, 2010.
  • Graymore, M., P. McRae-Williams, J. Block, B. Mitchell, A. Wallis, K. O’Toole and P. Vamplew (2009), "Footy, Flows and Farms: A Visualisation Tool for Determining Community Water Allocation Preferences", 21st Conference for the Pacific Regional Science Conference Organisation, Gold Coast, July 19 – 22, 2009Vamplew, P and Adams, A, "The SLARTI System: Computer sign language recognition" in AASE National Newsletter, Australian Association of Special Education, No2, 1992, p 9 (article requested by the editor)
  • Vamplew, P (ed), "AI'92: Summary of the IR&DB Technology Transfer Session of the 5th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence", 16-18 November 1992, Hobart, Tasmania
  • Bye, S, Adams, A and Vamplew, P, "A Self-Growing Neural Architecture for Classification", Technical report R92-3, Department of Computer Science, University of Tasmania, Hobart, December, 1992
  • Vamplew, P and Adams, A, "Real World Problems in Backpropagation", Technical Report R91-4, Department of Computer Science, University of Tasmania, Hobart, December, 1991