Dr. Brian Logan

Associate Professor

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: C34

RESEARCH

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.

I am also involved in the ORCHID project.

Information about previous projects can be found here, and a list of publications here.

PhD students

Yuan Yao Tractable deliberation in agent programming languages
Daniela Dybalova Autonomy and context in human-agent collectives
Trang Doan Thu Procedural reflection in agent prgramming languages
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)
Nguyen Hoang Nga Verifying requirements for resource-bounded reasoners (first supervisor Natasha Alechina, graduated 2011)
Abdur Rakib Verifying requirements for resource-bounded reasoners (graduated 2011)
Konstantin Vikhorev Real-time guarantees in high-level agent programming languages (graduated 2011)

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

TEACHING

In this session I am teaching the following modules (all in the Spring semester):

Dissertation Projects (G53IDA, G53IDE, G53IDJ, G53IDR, G53IDS, G53IDY)

I am mostly interested in Artificial Intelligence problems, and I am happy to supervise projects in (almost) any area of AI. I have produced some suggestions for projects as a starting point, but I am happy to discuss other topics if there is an AI or general CS project you would like to do.

Current projects

Struan Ayre An autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner within a dynamic environment

George Georgiades Project management application

Hamish Greig Backgammon game and AI using MCTS and RAVE

He Chong Health consulant app

Le Xuan Multi-agent programming competition

Christian Shaw Multi-agent based simulation for operations management systems and control

Zhu Yunan Implementation of dominoes

MSc Dissertation Projects (G64PIT, G64PMI, G54PRO, HG4SCD)

Some suggested topics suitable for MSc projects can be found here. However if you have your own idea for a topic, I'd be happy to discuss it.

Other Teaching

In previous sessions I have taught:

I have also given courses at various summer schools, mostly in the area of logic and agents, e.g.:

Multi-Agent Programming, at the Midlands Graduate School in the Foundations of Computing Science (MGS 2013) in Leicester, April 8-12 2013
Logics and Multi-Agent Programming Languages, a tutorial at the Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012) in Valencia, June 4-8 2012
Logics and Agent Programming Languages at the 23rd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2011) in Ljubljana, August 8-12 2011
Logics and Agent Programming Languages at the 21st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2009) in Bordeaux, July 27-31 2009
Designing Intelligent Agents at the European Agent Systems Summer School, in Turin, 31 August - 4 September 2009

Brief Biography

Prior to coming to Nottingham, I was a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. I have also worked at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies on architectural CAD systems, the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge on computational models of belief revision and the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh on design support systems.

From 1999 to 2008 I was an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.

This file is maintained by Brian Logan

Last modified: 9-Jan-2012, 17:08

Struan Ayre	An autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner within a dynamic environment
George Georgiades	Project management application
Hamish Greig	Backgammon game and AI using MCTS and RAVE
He Chong	Health consulant app
Le Xuan	Multi-agent programming competition
Christian Shaw	Multi-agent based simulation for operations management systems and control
Zhu Yunan	Implementation of dominoes