Location

Room 08
551 Castle Street

Email

Department Fax

+64 3 479 8529

Alicia Monteith

PhD Student / Demonstrator / Tutor

Postal Address

Department of Computer Science
University of Otago
PO Box 56
DUNEDIN 9015
New Zealand

I already have a PhD (in chemistry) and think I must be a complete masochist to be returning for another one - but, unfortunately, if you want to do research in another field they tend to want you to have a PhD in that field too.

My project is titled "Computational Model of the Evolution of Primitive Emotions" and Anthony and Willem are my two wonderful supervisors. The basic premise of this work is that emotions allow animals flexibility of behavioural response within, initially, a narrow adaptive range. As such they are necessary for operant conditioning but not for associating novel stimuli with a preprogrammed response.

Since I have a rather appalling memory I decided a while ago to put things I had learnt, or things I might want to reference in the future, on a web-site so I could access it wherever I was in the world. As such there are various useful things like notes for the papers I have done, recipes, tai chi moves etc, all on this website:

http://alicia.orcon.net.nz

I also set up a post-graduate guide for the students here in a wiki at:

http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/otagounicoscpgguide

I've now been demonstrating 241 and 242 for two years and counting. This is my first year tutoring 243.