24 Sep 2008 - BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition |
| For the second year running an ECS dissertation on computerised agents has won the BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition, indicating that agents are becoming a reality. It is also the second year in a row that a researcher from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has won this annual award, which is presented by the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with the British Computer Society (BCS). |
| This year's winner, Dr Talal Rahwan from ECS, has developed new algorithms to enable greater co-operation between agents. He calls this interaction 'coalition formation' which allows autonomous agents to group and co-ordinate their activities efficiently so that they achieve their individual or collective goals. "Forming effective coalitions is a major research challenge in the field of multi-agent systems," said Dr Rahwan. "Central to this endeavour is the problem of determining which of the possible coalitions to form in order to achieve the goals of the system. Our algorithms significantly outperform previous ones in terms of execution time, solutions quality, and memory requirements." |
| Last year's winner, Dr Rajdeep Dash also from ECS, examined the role of agents in the way auctions are used to manage supply chains. Professor Nick Jennings, Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group at ECS, who supervised both dissertations, said: "The fact that dissertations on autonomous agent-based systems have won the British Computer Distinguished Dissertation Competition two years running is firm evidence that our agents are leaving the laboratory and are ready to be used in industry. We are now moving towards practical devices that support the effective co-ordination and formation of teams of first responders in major disaster response scenarios." |
| An example of where agents are being developed for use in disaster management scenarios is the ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks) project (http://www.aladdinproject.org/) which is now well under way and in which ECS is a partner. |
| The dissertation award selects the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science and publishes the winning dissertation and runner up submission on the BCS website. The prize winner will receive his award at the 2008 BCS Roger Needham Lecture, at the Royal Society in London, on 12th November. |
| Dr Talal Rahwan was funded during Phase 1 of the DTC - clearly our investment has paid off! That's exploitation!! |
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17 Jun 2008 - DTC Biometrics stuff reaches Korea |
| This video is well worth viewing, shows a report from Korean TV (we've no idea what they are saying) but Mark Nixon's interview is excellent use this link to open the video, does take a while to load up! |
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11 Mar 2008 - Selection of new Stand-Alone projects announced |
The following projects have been selected by the DTC Science and Technology Board. We welcome these new projects to the fold and thank all those who put forward their proposals for this call.
- Approximate Bayesian Computation for Scalable Manipulation of Belief to be run by QinetiQ
- Optimal Just-In-Time Decision Making in Dynamics Environments to be run by QinetiQ
- Effects-based Parsimonious Information Fusion for Planning, Condition Monitoring & Decsion Support to be run by Surrey University
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11 Feb 2008 - Call for new Stand-Alone projects closes |
| The recent call for stand-alone project proposals was significantly oversubscribed. A shortlist has now been selected, and all projects shortlisted have been notified. If you have not received any email notification you can assume that your proposal has been unsuccessful. The DIF DTC was pleased to note the high response to the call, and was encouraged by the high technical quality of most proposals. |
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16 Jan 2008 - Welsh Questions in the Commons |
| Mr. Don Touhig (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op): My right hon. Friend knows that General Dynamics in my constituency leads a £60 million defence research consortium with the Ministry of Defence, involving the universities of Cardiff, Cambridge and Imperial. What are the Government doing to ensure that the innovative ideas that come from that research benefit manufacturing industries in Wales? |
Mr. Hain (Secretary of State for Wales): My right hon. Friend will remember that I visited that factory with him. It is a fine example of manufacturing excellences in Wales, along with many others, such as the European Aeronautic Defence and Space company-EADS-which I visited, Airbus, the Metrix consortium and Visteon, with which I have worked. We will work closely with him and General Dynamics to see what opportunities there are. We will continue to invest in higher education and in skills and high technology to ensure that global companies such as General Dynamics continue to view Wales as an excellent base from which to operate.
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