About Me
- A picture of me with two of my best friends - Pete and Emily. I'm the blond chap with the coffee
Welcome to FunkyMonkeySoftware.com. This is the blog and portfolio of James Ravenscroft, an Artificial Intelligence student from Aberystwyth University, United Kingdom.
I am currently an undergraduate at Aberystwyth, however I intend to complete my degree and then continue into post-grad research in the field of AI. I am most fascinated by human -AI interaction and would like to research further into this field.
Currently, I consider Computer-Human communication to be a fairly messy and inefficient affair. I would like to see highly accurate Speech recognition and human realistic text-to-speech systems widely available in the next 10 years. I am also interested in mission-critical systems that (almost) never crash. I believe until we can solve the problems that unreliable computer systems provide, humans will never fully trust machines to to important tasks (I mean, would you get in an airplane controlled by AI if it was likely to crash? I wouldn't!)
So enough of the work-related stuff. What else do I like to do? Well, when I have some spare time, I like to make music. I am a saxophonist of 10 years and a guitarist of 3. Not to mention, I am also an amateur at the Harmonica, Stylophone, Piano, Bass Guitar and Drums. I am completely devout to music and can't go a day without listening to some form or another. I frequently perform in the Aberystwyth University Wind Band and like to mess around, composing and writing songs on my computer. My friends also know that I'm available to hire for bonfire and camping events with my hand-crafted-in-Scotland, Freshman Acoustic Guitar and my trusty Harmonica.
As well as music, I enjoy walking and travelling, especially if I've got my camera at the ready. Sight-seeing and travelling are top priority as far as I'm concerned. I've already got Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Malta and the USA under my belt and was actually born in Hamilton, Bermuda.
Finally, on a much more relevant and nerdier note. I love a great sci-fi film or a Japanese Anime. I was recently introduced to the Aberystwyth Sci-Fi club by Pete shown in the picture above. Not only do they play some fantastic films, they are also home to a great host of very cool, eccentric and likeminded students and post-grads. You'll find me hanging out with them on Wednesday and Friday nights.
