abstractvoid.se aka lolsson.com aka Lars Olsson's homepage

Hej and welcome to my little home on the web. Here you can find some information about me and my hobbies, software, research etc ... I have now started to write a blog. How interesting! lo at abstractvoid dot se

Music is important. I like Belle and Sebastian, Softball, The Smiths, Autechre, Future Sound of London, Fugazi, The Cardigans, Iron Maiden, Stone Roses, Max Romeo, Massive Attack, Black Uhuru, Atari Teenage Riot, Dr Dre, Snoop, Dinosaur jr, Gangstarr, The Supremes, Welle Erdball, and much, much more...

Here some photos from various trips and events: Climbing Chamonix 2000 and Sylarna 2001 Japan 2003 Sylarna 2004 Me and Martin's Interstellar Jumpsuits (Zoltan!) Seattle and California 2004 Genoa 2004 Boston 2004 St Albans Japan and Dubai 2005 Morocco April 2005 Ben Nevis May 2005 Pool and MC Hammer/Flashdance Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Lattvia 2005 Japan Summer 2005 Colorado March 2006 Japan March 2006 Crayfish party + Tommy's wedding 2006 Australia and Korea 2006 Vail 2007 Wedding Day!

I love books and reading. Some of my favorite books include 'Burmese Days' by George Orwell, The 'Lord of the Rings' Triology by Tolkien, 'Junky' by William S. Burroughs, and everything by Isaac Singer and Joseph Heller. Another more recent favorite author is Yukio Mishima, especially the books 'The Golden Pavillion' and the amazing 'Sun and Steel'.

Another major interest of mine is programming and computers. I am especially interested interested in operating systems, wireless networking, and security. I prefer to use Linux and OpenBSD on my machines. You can download some programs I've written (including the source of course) here.

One other major interest of mine is travelling and backpacking. So far I've been to around 35 different countries. Here are the I've travelled in so far and here are the American states I've been to.

I also love all kinds of outdoors activities including snowboarding, trekking, skiing, and climbing. I am a founding member of Pozersontherock.

My research interests are artificial intelligence and real stupidity, robotics, information theory, neural processing and statistics of the sensoric environment. 2001-2002 I did an MSc at the University of Sussex in 'Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems'. I wrote my MSc thesis entitled 'Anomaly Detection Using Self/Nonself Discrimination' about immune systems and anomaly detection for the Linux kernel. This work has also resulted in a paper that was presented at the Nordu/Usenix conference in February 2003. The same month I also started to do my PhD in Sensor Evolution at the University of Hertfordshire with Chrystopher Nehaniv and Daniel Polani as supervisors. I have now (May 2006) finished my thesis titled: Information Self-structuring for Developmental Robotics: Organization, Adaptation, and Integration. Here is the table of contents and chapter 1. If you are interested in reading the whole thesis, please email me at l dot a dot olsson at gmail dot com. Here are some of my publications: Lars Olsson, Treating Sensors as "Meaningless" Channels of Information, in preparation Lars Olsson, What is it Like to Be an AIBO? Visual Statistics of a Four-Legged Robot, in preparation Lars Olsson, Information Self-structuring for Developmental Robotics: Organization, Adaptation, and Integration, PhD thesis, University of Hertfordshire, May 2006 Daniel Polani, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Alexander Klyubin, Lars Olsson, Information in the Perception and Action of Embodied Agents. Künstliche Intelligenz, 3/06:35-38. Special Issue on Learning and Self-organization of Behavior. Abstract Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, From Unknown Sensors and Actuators to Actions Grounded in Sensorimotor Perceptions, Connection Science issue 18.2 Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, Measuring Informational Distances Between Sensors and Sensor Integration, accepted for oral presentation at ALIFEX in Bloominton June 2006 , also available asTechnical report 431, University of Hertfordshire, 2005 C. L. Nehaniv, D. Polani, L. Olsson, and A. Klyubin, Evolutionary Information-Theoretic Foundations of Sensory Ecology:Channels of Organism-Specific Meaningful Information, In Modeling Biology: Structures, Behaviors, Evolution (Konrad Lorenz Institute, Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology), MIT Press (in preparation). B. Robins, K. Dautenhahn, C. L. Nehaniv, N. A. Mirza, D. Francois, L. Olsson, Sustaining interaction dynamics and engagement in dyadic child-robot interaction kinesics: Lessons learnt from an exploratory study, Proc. IEEE Ro-man 2005 Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, Discovering Motion Flow by Temporal-Informational Correlations in Sensors, Epigenetic Robotics 2005, July 2005, pdf Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, Sensor Adaptation and Development in Robots by Entropy Maximization of Sensory Data, CIRA 2005 special session on Ontogenetic Robotics, June 2005, pdf Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, From Unknown Sensors and Actuators to Visually Guided Movement, ICDL 2005, 2005, pdf Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, The Effects on Visual Information in a Robot in Environments with Oriented Contours, Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, August 25-27th Genoa, Italy, pdf Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, Information Trade-Offs and the Evolution of Sensory Layouts, Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALIFE9) September 12-15th 2004 Boston, Massachusetts, USA, pdf Lars Olsson, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Daniel Polani, Sensory Channel Grouping and Structure from Uninterpreted Sensor Data, NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware June 24-26, 2004 Seattle, Washington, USA, pdf Lars Olsson, Anomaly Detection Using Self/Nonself Discrimination for the Linux Kernel, Nordu/Usenix 2003, Vasteras, February 2003, pdf Lars Olsson, Evolution of Bargaining Strategies for Double Auction Markets Using Genetic Programming, Conference of Computational Intelligence in Finance and Economics, Joint International Conference of Information Science, Atlantic City 2000 Lars Olsson, Evolution of Bargaining Strategies Using Genetic Programming, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Orlando 1999, (poster) In my previous life in Sweden I used to work at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in the Intelligent Systems Lab.