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
My research interests lie in the area of
agent systems, and
spans the specification, design and implementation of agents, including
agent architectures, agent programming languages and logics and theories
for agent-based systems. I am also interested in applications
of agents, particularly in virtual environments and in simulation.
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.
This file is maintained by Brian
Logan
Last modified: 17-Sep-2009, 11:18