NEWS

2024

• (2024/11/15) The Animal-AI WebGL version started development, enabling access from the comfort of your browser!

• (2024/10/08) The Animal-AI Environment: A Virtual Laboratory For Comparative Cognition and Artificial Intelligence Research is posted on ArXiv as a pre-print and submitted for journal review. (link)

• (2024/08/01) The CFI/Animal-AI YouTube website is now live, offering guidance on getting started with Animal-AI. (link)

• (2024/03/08) The latest Animal-AI build has been released, with updates to the objects in the environment, the user interface, and more! (link)

• (2024/02/05) The Animal-AI PyPI package has received major updates for improved ease-of-use and integration with the latest build. (link)

• (2024/01/01) A comprehensive documentation overhaul has been implemented and released on our main GitHub repository, further making Animal-AI more user friendly and easier to get started to!

2023

• (2023/12/20) Animal-AI 3: What's New & Why You Should Care is posted on ArXiv as a pre-print and submitted for journal review. (link)

• (2023/11/01) The Animal-AI PyPI package has been updated for compatibility with the latest build. (link)

• (2023/11/01) Konstantinos Voudouris joins the Major Transitions in the Evolution of Cognition project as a research assistant/associate, building models of cognition in the Animal-AI Environment.

• (2023/10/01) PhD student Seraphina Zhang and Masters + PhD student Ben Slater join the team, building agents and experiments in Animal-AI for translational research with children and computational models.

• (2023/09/21) Inferring Capabilities from Task Performance with Bayesian Triangulation is posted on ArXiv as a pre-print. (link)

• (2023/07/24) What is a Stimulus? A Computational Perspective on an Associative Learning Model is published in A-Life and presented in Tokyo, Japan. (link)

• (2023/06/15) Natasza Siwinska and Jason Liu submit their undergraduate dissertations, investigating object permanence in humans and Deep Reinforcement Learning using the Animal-AI Environment.

• (2023/03/01) Wout Schellaert, PhD student at the Technical University of Valencia, joins the team, implementing procedural generation tools and model-based RL agents in the Animal-AI Environment.

• (2023/02/01) Development of Animal-AI 3, the latest version of the environment, commences, led by Dr Lucy Cheke, Ibrahim Alhas, and Konstantinos Voudouris.

• (2023/01/15) Software Engineer Ibrahim Alhas joins the team, continuing the development of Animal-AI.

2022

• (2022/10/01) Undergraduate students Jason Liu and Natasza Siwinska commence projects using the Animal-AI Environment at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Lucy Cheke and Konstantinos Voudouris.

• (2022/07/25) Evaluating Object Permanence in Embodied Agents using the Animal-AI Environment is presented as an accepted paper at EBeM'22: Workshop on AI Evaluation Beyond Metrics in Vienna, Austria.

• (2022/05/24) Direct Human-AI Comparison in the Animal-AI Environment is published in Frontiers in Psychology (link).

• (2022/04/20) Not a Number: Identifying Instance Features for Capability-Oriented Evaluation is accepted at IJCAI-ECAI 2022 in Vienna, Austria. (link)

2021

• Lucy Cheke and José Hernández-Orallo secure 3-years of funding for a DARPA project on Robust Evaluation of Cognitive Capabilities and Generality in Artificial Intelligence (RECoG-AI), using the Animal-AI Environment to build better measurement and evaluation tools.

• (2021/11/01) Matishalin Patel joins the Major Transitions in the Evolution of Cognition project as a research associate, building models of cognition in the Animal-AI Environment.

• (2021/07/01) Joel Holmes is hired as a research assistant for 6 months, continuing to develop Animal-AI with Matthew McGill.

• (2021/04/11) Direct Human-AI Comparison in the Animal-AI Environment is posted as a pre-print on PsyArXiv. (link)

2020

• (2020/10/08) Murray Shanahan, Matthew Crosby (now McGill), Benjamin Beyret, and Lucy Cheke publish Artificial Intelligence and the Common Sense of Animals in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. (link)

• (2020/10/01) Konstantinos Voudouris commences his PhD in Psychology, working on cognitive evaluation of AI with the Animal-AI Environment.

• (2020/08/13) Building Thinking Machines by Solving Animal Cognition Tasks is published in Minds and Machines. (link)

• (2020/03/01) Animal-AI is built out to allow collection of game play data with humans.

2019

• (2019/12/09) Animal-AI Olympics Competition results announced at NeurIPS 2019!

• (2019/10/01) Konstantinos Voudouris joins the team as a Masters student in Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

• (2019/07/01) AnimalAI Version 1.0 Release

• (2019/06/30) Animal-AI Olympics NeurIPS Competition opens with over $30k in prizes! (neurips) (https://www.animixi.com/)

• (2019/05/13) The Animal-AI Olympics is published in Nature Machine Intelligence. (link)

• (2019/04/30) The WBA prize to the most biologically-plausible agent sponsored by https://wba-initiative.org/.

• (2019/04/01) Release of v0.1.0 of the Animal-AI Environment.

• (2019/03/13) Animal-AI Olympics (Preparatory) Workshop with GoodAI at the University of Cambridge. 

• (2019/01/01) Benjamin Beyret joins the team, helping to develop the Animal-AI Environment and Olympics Competition.

• (2019/01/01) Research and development on Animal-AI begins, led by Matthew Crosby (now McGill).