Ph.D. studentship:
Optimizations of Multi-Agent systems
(CLOSED ************ CLOSED)
No more applications will be accepted
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Applications are sought for a three year Ph.D. position to study various
aspects of optimizing Multi-Agent Systems -
with a particular emphasis to Heterogenous Agents Systems like
IMPACT.
This is an opportunity to join the
a very active research group within the Foundations Division of the The University of Manchester.
Our computer science department has recently got a 5* evaluation in the countrywide Research Assessment Evaluation and therefore belongs to the top 6 institutions
of its kind.
The Foundations Division is working in all aspects of formal methods in Computer Science
such as
- Reasoning
- Learning
- Formal Development
- Computational Models.
The student will gain training in research skills and learn how to apply formal methods to fundamental problems in agent systems. Prerequisites are a very good degree, including a good knowledge of Mathematical Logic and formal methods in computer science; some knowledge of Distributed Systems and Knowledge Representation as well as an object-oriented programming language such as JAVA would be appreciated. Studentship will start as soon as a valid candidate has been found, preferably by 1. April 2002.
The position will be supported by an
EPSRC Grant, issued from 2002-2005, under the guidance of
Juergen Dix.
The environment is the Computer Science
department at The University of Manchester, which is one of the
largest and most successful Computer Science departments in the
UK.
- Fees will be paid by the EPSRC grant, and living expenses will be
paid according to current EPSRC rates (£7,500 per annum).
- Substantial extra funding is available for participation at
international conferences and workshops.
- For exceptionally
high-calibre students there is a limited number of ATLAS
Research scholarships; these additionally pay a maintenance grant of
£6,000 over the three years.
- Moreover, students may be qualified for
Teaching Assistantships, which additionally pays an honorarium of
£1,575 per year in return for undertaking one day per week teaching
duties.
- Students are encouraged to attend and submit papers to conferences and to publish their results in academic journals. PhD students within the department typically share an office with three or four people.
- The department runs several training modules (PhD modules) which are specifically aimed at research students. The University also provides training, and it is possible for research students to take modules on the MSc in Advanced Computer Science (MSc) . As this is an EPSRC-funded studentship, the successful candidate will also attend one of the Research Council's Graduate Schools (gradschool) free of charge.
Research description
Research in Multi Agent Systems is a growing area which
addresses the need to move from the development of massive programs
containing millions of lines of code, to smaller, modular, pieces of
code, where each module performs a well defined, focused task (rather
than thousands of them). Software agents as well as agents
especially designed for web-applications constitute the latest
innovation in this trend towards splitting complex software systems
into components.
Although there have been developed in the last years a huge variety of
techniques and methods related to agents, a well-defined theoretical
foundation unifying the different facets under one umbrella is still
missing. This situation is also reflected by the fact, that there is
no real textbook for Multi-Agent Programming available yet. Besides
the book of G. Weiss, Multi-Agent Systems, MIT Press 1999 which
is, like similar books edited by Wooldridge/Jennings, a collection
of individual articles devoted to several important general
techniques, there is only the recent book Heterogenous Agent
Systems by VS. Subrahmanian et. al., MIT Press 2000.
The latter book describes a particular, but general approach to
Multi-Agency, with unified notation and detailed theoretical
foundations.
This project focusses on the following two problems that are
faced by any agent system:
- Agents need to react quickly to changes in the world. Their
decision component must be designed for efficiency.
- Agents are often confronted with a large number of client
requests that need to be satisfied concurrently.
Solutions to these two problems certainly depend on the
underlying framework that the theory of agents is based upon. The IMPACT
framework, because it is based on formal methods, makes it quite easy
to formulate both problems in a rigorous and formal manner so that
both problems can be mathematically investigated. On the other hand,
IMPACT is sufficiently generic that any solution of
the two problems in IMPACT is likely to carry over to the
general problems as well.
References
J. Dix
A Computational Logic Approach to Heterogenous Agent Systems
LPNMR 2001: In Th. Eiter,
M.~Truszczyñski and W. Faber, editors,
Logic
Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning,
Proceedings of the Sixth
International Conference. Springer LNCS, September 2001.
Bibtex-entry
V.S. Subrahmanian, P. Bonatti, J. Dix, Th. Eiter, S. Kraus, F. Ozcan, R. Ross
Heterogenous Agent Systems
MIT-Press, June 2000. ISBN 0262194368. See
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See also Sample Version
Bibtex-entry
Please contact, preferably by email, until 1st of February 2002:
Jürgen Dix
Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
Email: dix@cs.man.ac.uk
WWW: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~jdix/
Phone: +44 (161) 275-6185
Fax: +44 (161) 275-6204
Application forms for Ph.D. study can be downloaded from
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/Study_subweb/Postgrad/fees_and_funding.asp
Alternatively, you can ask for them at the following address:
The Postgraduate Admissions Secretary
Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
Email: pgsec@cs.man.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (161) 275 6181
Fax: +44 (161) 275 6204