DISCLAIMER: This is a personal document and may not reflect the views of The University of Nottingham or the School of Computer Science.

Dr Brian Logan

RESEARCH INTERESTS

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.

Previous 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 Comminssion under the Sixth Framework Programme as project number 004150.
  
• Agent-based and Continum 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.
  
• 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.
• 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.
  
• Distributed Optimistic Simulation of Agent-Based Systems was a collaborative project with the Systems, Models and Simulation group at the University of Birmingham. The aim of the project was to develop algorithms and techniques for the parallel distributed simulation of agent-based systems. In particular, it addressed 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 aimed 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).
• Evolvable virtual information processing architectures for human-like minds explored information processing models of mind by combining philosophical conceptual analysis and philosophically inspired top-down design, along with bottom-up use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to produce software and demonstrations. The project also attempted to take account of ideas and empirical results from other relevant disciplines, including brain science, psychology, and theoretical biology. This work was funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust.
  
• Autonomous Agents was an attempt to understand aspects of the high level architecture of human-like agents, particularly those which might account for states in which there is partial loss of control of thought processes such as fear, grief or excited anticipation. The project developed and tested architectures and techniques necessary to model autonomous intelligent agents with multiple independent goals capable of complex decision making under constraints such as incomplete and uncertain information and time pressure. This work was funded by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA Malvern, now part of QuintiQ).

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.

Other research activities

• 2009: Programme committee, Thirteenth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2009), Singapore, October 25-28, 2009.
  
• 2008: Program Vice-Chair, Agents and Distributed Computing, Seventh IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC 2009), Vancouver, Canada, August 29-31, 2009.
  
• 2009: Organising committee, Workshop on Logics and Agent Programming Languages (LAPL 2009), at the 21st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2009), Bordeaux, July 20-31 2009.
  
• 2008: Programme committee, Sixth European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2008), Bath, UK, December 18-19, 2008.
  
• 2008: Programme committee, Sixth IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC 2008), Shanghai, China, December 17-20, 2008.
  
• 2008: Programme committee, Twelfth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2008), Vancouver, Canada, October 27-29, 2008.
  
• 2007: Programme committee, Fifth European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2007), Hammamet, Tunisia, December 13-14, 2007.
  
• 2007: Organising committee, Workshop on Logics for Resource-Bounded Agents (LRBA 2007), Durham, UK, September 3-7, 2007.
  
• 2007: Programme committee, Eleventh IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2007), Chania, Crete, October 22-24, 2007.
  
• 2007: Programme committee, The Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2007), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, July 22-26, 2007.
  
• 2006: Reviewer, Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2006), Monterey, CA USA, December 3-6, 2006.
  
• 2006: Programme committee, Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2006), Monterey, CA USA, December 3-6, 2006.
  
• 2006: Programme committee, Tenth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2006), Malaga, Spain, October 2-6, 2006.
  
• 2006: The Challenges of working with Grids for Simulations Nottingham, UK, September 20, 2006. A Birds of a Feather Session at the Fifth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting
  
• 2006: Reviewer, Twentieth ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2006), Singapore, May 24-26, 2006.
  
• 2006: Organising committee, International Workshop on Distributed Simulation on the Grid (DSGrid'06), Singapore, May 19, 2006. Co-located with the Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'06)
  
• 2006: Programme committee, Fourth International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT'06), Hakodate, Japan, May 8, 2006. Co-located with the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomus Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-06)
  
• 2005: Programme committee, Ninth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2005), Montreal, Canada, October 10-12th, 2005.
  
• 2005: Organising committee, Workshop on Formal Models of Resource-Bounded Agents (FMRBA), held at the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'2005), Utretch, July 2005.
  
• 2005: Programme committee, Workshop on Modelling Natural Action Selection (MNAS-2005), held at the Ninteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'05), Edinburgh, July/August 2005.
  
• 2004: Organising committee, Joint Workshop on Multi-Agent and Multi-Agent-Based Simulation (MAMABS'04), held at the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'2004), New York, July 2004.
  
• 2001: Programme committee, Third International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'01), Madrid, September 2001.
• 2001: Reviewer, 15th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2001), Lake Arrowhead, California, May 2001
• 2001: Programme committee, AISB 2001 Convention symposium on Emotion, Cognition and Affective Computing, York, March 2001.

PUBLICATIONS

• Papers

SOFTWARE

I am also one of the authors and maintainer of pop-mode for XEmacs/FSF Emacs which allows Pop-11 development to be done in Emacs with (almost) as much support as in in Ved. Pop-mode provides support for editing Pop-11 code, compiling code from an Emacs buffer and reading the Poplog documentation. It is available from the Birmingham Poplog ftp directory in the emacs directory or as a gzipped tar file.