Professor Nick Jennings

Title of the talk

Agreement Technologies

Computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements are fast becoming commonplace in a wide range of networked systems (e.g., in the semantic web, Grid computing, pervasive computing and peer-to-peer systems). In such systems, agents are required to participate in a range of negotiation scenarios and exhibit a range of negotiation behaviours (depending on the context). To this end, this talk explores the issues involved in designing and implementating the mechanisms and the strategies by which such agreements can be attained.

Speaker Biography

Nick Jennings is Professor of Computer Science in the 5*-rated School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University where he carries out basic and applied research in agent-based computing. He is Deputy Head of School (Research), Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group (which consists of some 120 research staff and postgraduate students) and is also the Chief Scientific Officer for Lost Wax.

He has published over 250 articles and 6 books on various facets of agent-based computing and holds 2 patents (3 more pending). He is in the top 100 or so most cited computer scientists (out of 750,000) according to the CiteSeer digital library and has received a number of awards for his research: the Computers and Thought Award (the premier award for a young AI scientist) in 1999 (this is the only time in the Award's 30 year history that it has been given to someone based in Europe), an IEE Achievement Medal in 2000, and the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2003. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the European artificial intelligence association (ECCAI) and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC).

For a complete Curriculum Vitae, click here.
For a list of scientific publications, click here.

Professor Donald Michie

Title of the talk

Educating SOPHIE: progress towards Turing's test using his 'child machine' concept

Speaker Biography

Donald Michie was born on 11 November 1923, and was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained the MA, DPhil, and DSc degrees from Oxford University for studies in biological sciences. For contributions to artificial intelligence he was elected a founding Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. He has received honorary degrees from the UK's National Council of Academic Awards, from Salford University, Aberdeen University, the University of York and the University of Stirling.

His awards include the 1995 Achievement Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (UK) for contributions to computing and control, and the 1996 Feigenbaum Medal of the World Congress on Expert Systems for his development of machine learning into an industrial-strength tool. In 2001 he received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence. His interest in programming human intelligence into machines originated during his membership of the British code-breaking group at Bletchley Park during World War 2.

Professor Michie was founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Machine Intelligence series, of which nineteen volumes have appeared to date. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences and of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Machine Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He is also founder and Treasurer of the Human-Computer Learning Foundation, a charity registered in the UK.

For a complete Curriculum Vitae, click here.
For a list of scientific publications, click here.
For recently released information about wartime code-breaking at Bletchley Park, click here.
For Donald Michie's current research on conversational agents, click here.
For background on the Human-Computer Learning Foundation click here.