Ben Murdoch: Tech Wizard

Ben Murdoch is passionate about building robots. That's why when he began his undergraduate degree, he went on a quest to help the robotics community. As a freshman, he began working with Dr. David Wingate, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Several years later and a bevy of accomplishments under his belt, Ben is ready to change the world of robotics.

As a research scientist, Ben is passionate for teaching others and sharing his skills. He was the founder of three robotics clubs, a member of the team that won the IEEE CIG 2016 and 2017 Artificial Text Adventurer Competition, and a Flight Director at the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center. In 2017 he published papers at NIPS and IJCAI on Affordance Extraction via Word Embeddings and Informing Action Primitives Through Free-Form Text. His current work in the Perception, Control, and Cognition laboratory at Brigham Young University focuses on emergent communication protocols for acquisition of symbol groundings. Ben is double majoring in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Computer Science.

In 2018, under the direction of Dr. David Wingate, Ben joined a team of BYU students to compete in the second annual Alexa Prize Challenge. BYU's team, one of eight in the world, were given a $250,000 grant and tasked with programming a bot named Eve (short for Emotive Adversarial Ensembles) to answer users' questions, as well as hold a conversation.

During the summer of 2018, Ben traveled to Melbourne, Australia to present his paper ‘What can you do with a rock? Affordance extraction via word embeddings' at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Ben's paper is designed as a stepping stone towards "general AI," the ability of one algorithm to solve a wide array of problems. The paper is foundational to the goals Ben has for his Honors Thesis, and he intends to build a framework to interact with both human and the real world, going where no robot has gone before.

Ben and his wife Kayla plan to return to their jobs at Microsoft this summer to work.

When asked what he hopes to do in the future, Ben said he wants to further robotics. More specifically, take them to the real world and let them learn shared tasks. "There is no Rosetta Stone," Ben said. "There is no common link."

When it comes to exploration and learning, it's safe to say Ben has the skills and is gaining the expertise to change the world of robotics.