Communication and co-ordination of intelligent systems.
There is a need to develop mechanisms by which autonomous agents can communicate and organise themselves to solve problems. The state of the art in the co-ordination of such multi-agent systems is through game theoretic and market-based mechanisms and formal models of dialogue. I have worked extensively in this area.
Rational decision making within intelligent systems.
As agents and the environments in which they are depoyed become more complex, we need to develop more powerful techniques to enable them to make good decisions about what to do in uncertain conditions. In this area I work on logic based models of intelligent agency and on techniques which use classical decision theory..
Learning and adaptation
in intelligent agents.
In complex environments it is not always possible to directly program agents so that they are sufficiently well-behaved---we just do not have enough information about the environment. In such cases it is possible to instead have systems adapt to their environments using techniques such as evolutionary computing and reinforcement learning..
Applications.
The reason for developing work along the lines described above is in order to build robust intelligent systems which are capable of solving real problems in complex and uncertain environments. I have applied my research in a number of areas, including electronic commerce, risk assessment, telecommunications network management, mobile robotics and consumer modelling.
