Dr. Brian Logan

Lecturer

School of Computer Science
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, NG8 1BB UK

Phone: +44-115-846-6509
Fax: +44-115-951-4254
Email: bsl@cs.nott.ac.uk
Office: B37

RESEARCH

I am a member of the Agents Lab and the Mixed Reality Laboratory.

Current projects

• EDUCATE: Sustainable Energy-Efficient Architectural Design. EDUCATE is a 1.6m euro seven partner project funded under the EU Intelligent Energy Europe II programme coordinated by the School of the Built Environment. EDUCATE will develop a new integrated architectural curriculum in sustainable energy-efficient design. As part of the project, the School of Computer science will develop an e-learning portal which will allow students, educators and building professionals across Europe to collaborate in the development of environmentally sustainable building designs.
• Verifying Requirements for Resource-Bounded Agents: the aim of this project is to provide theoretical foundations and practical tools for analysing resource requirements (time, memory, communication bandwidth) for systems of reasoning agents. This is a collaborative project with researchers in the automated reasoning division of ITC-irst. The project is funded by the EPSRC as project number EP/E031226.

Past projects

• Agent-based Integrative Modelling of Bacterial Populations: the aim of this project is to explore the feasibility of using distributed Grid-based simulation techniques for studying complex agent-based models of cell populations. The project will investigate the computational efficiency of biological simulations built using HLA-compliant simulators instantiated and linked using Grid services and, more generally, assess the suitability of the HLA framework for biological modelling. This is a collaborative project with the Centre for Mathematical Medicine at the University of Nottingham. The work is funded by the BBSRC as project number BB/D006619/1.
  
• INSCAPE: Storytelling for Creative People: the aim of this project is to enable ordinary people to interactively conceive, author, publish and experience `interactive stories' in a variety of forms, e.g., theatre, movies, cartoons, puppet shows, video-games, interactive manuals and training simulations. A key component of interactivity is the generation of natural agent behaviours within virtual, augmented and mixed realities. INSCAPE is a 14 partner integrated project, funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme as project number 004150.
  
• Agent-based and Continuum Modelling of Populations of Cells. Many biological problems involve a wide range of scales, from, say, an individual gene operating within a cell to a very large population of cells operating in concert. The aim of this project is to develop models of interactions within bacterial populations which capture population scale behaviour and account adequately for the diversity and complexity of individual members of the population. This is a collaborative project with the Centre for Mathematical Medicine at the University of Nottingham. The work is funded by the EPSRC as project number EP/C549406/1.
  
• Model Checking Resource-Bounded Agents is a collaborative project with the Automated Reasoning Division of ITC-IRST in Trento.  The aim of the project is to develop a framework for for model-checking resource bounded agents. This involves designing logics to specify the desired behaviour of resource bounded agents and adapting an existing model checker to verify these properties. The project is funded by the Royal Society.
  
• Large Scale Distributed Simulation on the Grid is an e-Science Sister Project involving the Midlands e-Science Centre of Excellence in Modelling and Analysis of Complex Systems and the Parallel and Distributed Computing Centre, Nanyang Technological University. The long term aim of the project is a "Grid plug-and-play distributed simulation system": a distributed collaborative simulation environment where researchers with different domain knowledge and expertise, possibly at different locations, develop, modify, assemble and execute distributed simulation components on the Grid. The work is funded by the EPSRC as project number GR/S82862/01.
• Distributed Optimistic Simulation of Agent-Based Systems is a collaborative project with the Systems, Models and Simulation group at the University of Birmingham. The aim of this project is to develop algorithms and techniques for the parallel distributed simulation of agent-based systems. In particular, it addresses the problems of dynamic state distribution, interest management, load balancing and synchronisation. The long term aim of this work is the development of a generic simulation kernel for the parallel distributed simulation of agent-based systems. However the algorithms and techniques developed are also applicable to the efficient simulation of any system with a large shared state, e.g., ecological modelling, artificial life and computer entertainment and games. The work was funded by the EPSRC, as project number GR/R45338/01.
  
• Real-time Agent Architectures for Believable Worlds: the aim of this project is to develop intelligent agents that can run in real time on limited hardware in complex, dynamic `game-like' or `life-like' simulated environments (e.g., 3D terrain containing objects and other agents) about which only limited information is available and where decisions must be made under time pressure. This work was sponsored by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE).

PhD students

• Nguyen Hoang Nga Verifying requirements for resource-bounded reasoners (first supervisor Natasha Alechina)
• Abdur Rakib Verifying requirements for resource-bounded reasoners
• Konstantin Vikhorev Real-time guarantees in high-level agent programming languages
• Trang Doan Thu Verification of agent programs
• Julian Zappala Agent-based models of group decsion making
• Liu Xiaofan Analysis and verification of business rules (first supervisor Natasha Alechina)
• Hai Nguyen Belief revision for ontologies (first supervisor Natasha Alechina)

Previous PhD students

• Elizabeth Gordon Real-time Agent Architectures for Believable Worlds (graduated 2005)
• Mike Lees Adaptive Optmistic Simulation of Agent Based Systems (graduated 2006)
• Dan Fielding Agents Reporting from Collaborative Virtual Environments (co-supervised with Steve Benford, graduated 2007)
• Mark Jago Logics for Resource Bounded Agents (co-supervised with Natasha Alechina, graduated 2006)
• Neil Madden Multi-agent reporting on events in persistent virtual environments (graduated 2009)

I am always happy to consider PhD applications from suitably qualified candidates.