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About

Chris Dobbyn is a researcher whose work sits at the fascinating intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and musical improvisation. His primary research areas explore how principles of behavior-based AI—particularly the non-representational, subsumption architecture pioneered by Rodney Brooks—can be applied to model creative, real-time interaction. Dobbyn’s major contribution lies in designing artificial agents capable of collaborative free improvisation, offering a novel computational lens through which to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of spontaneous musical dialogue. His most cited work, "The Self as an Embedded Agent" (34 citations), extends this thinking into cognitive science, proposing a set of conditions for situatedness and embodiment that challenge traditional notions of self-awareness. His 2015 paper on a subsumption agent for collaborative free improvisation (17 citations) provides a concrete, evaluated system that demonstrates how improvisational interaction can emerge without internal representations. Dobbyn’s research is notable for its interdisciplinary ambition, bridging robotics, music, and philosophy to ask fundamental questions about intelligence, agency, and the nature of creative exchange.