Mixed Reality Laboratory

BSc, PhD Nottingham.

Lecturer.

research interests

My main research interests lie in the area of intelligent agents, and span the specification, design and implementation of agents, including agent architectures, logics and ontologies for agent-based systems and software tools for building agents. Other areas of interest include belief revision and design theory.

I am a member of the Interactive Media and Foundations of Programming research groups.

current projects

• 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.
• 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.
• Agent-based and Continuum 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.
• 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 Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme as project number 004150.

publications, conference papers

Recent papers:

William I. Sellers, Russell A. Hill, and Brian Logan (2007). "An Agent-Based Model of Group Decision Making in Baboons", in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. (to appear).

Michael Lees, Brian Logan, and Georgios Theodoropoulos (2007). "Distributed Simulation of Agent-Based Systems with HLA", in Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation. (to appear).

John King, Michael Lees, and Brian Logan (2006). "Agent-Based and Continuum Modelling of Populations of Cells", Technical report. University of Nottingham.

Michael Lees, Brian Logan, Chen Dan, Ton Oguara, and Georgios Theodoropoulos (2006). "Analysing Probabilistically Constrained Optimism", in Proceedings of the Tenth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2006) (pp. 201-208).

Michael Lees, Brian Logan, and Georgios Theodoropoulos (2006). "Agents, games and HLA", in Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, 14(6), 752-767.

Michael Lees, Brian Logan, and Chen Dan, Ton Oguara, and Georgios Theodoropoulos (2006). "Analysing the Performance of Optimistic Synchronisation Algorithms in Simulations of Multi-Agent Systems", in Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2006) (pp. 37-44).

Dan Fielding, Brian Logan, and Steve Benford (2006). "Balancing the needs of players and spectators in agent-based commentary systems", in Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2006) (pp. 996-998).

Natasha Alechina, Rafael H. Bordini, Jomi Fred Hubner, Mark Jago, and Brian Logan (2006). "Belief Revision for AgentSpeak Agents", in Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2006) (pp. 1288-1290).

Ronald Ewald, Chen Dan, Ton Oguara, Georgios Theodoropoulos, Michael Lees, Brian Logan, Ton Oguara, and Adelinde M. Uhrmacher (2006). "Performance Analysis of Shared Data Access Algorithms for Distributed Simulation of MAS", in Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2006) (pp. 29-36).

Natasha Alechina, Piergiorgio Bertoli, Chiara Ghidini, Mark Jago, Brian Logan, and Luciano Serafini (2006). "Verifying space and time requirements for resource-bounded agents", in Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence (MoChArt-2006) (pp. 16-30).

Natasha Alechina, Mark Jago, and Brian Logan (2006). "Modal logics for communicating rule-based agents", in Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI ’06) (pp. 322-326).

Alex Albore, Natasha Alechina, Piergiorgio Bertoli, Chiara Ghidini, Brian Logan, and Luciano Serafini (2006). "Model-checking memory requirements of resource-bounded reasoners", in Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ’06) (pp. 213-218).

Natasha Alechina, Mark Jago, and Brian Logan (2006). "Resource-Bounded Belief Revision and Contraction", in Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies III, Third International Workshop, DALT 2005, Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 25, 2005, Selected and Revised Papers (pp. 141-154).

For a full list (with downloads) go to: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/cgi-bin/bsl/papers.cgi

other activities

Organising committee, Workshop on Logics for Resource-Bounded Agents (LRBA 2007), Durham, UK, September 3-7, 2007.

Programme committee, The Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2007), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, July 22-26, 2007.

Reviewer, Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2006), Monterey, CA USA, December 3-6, 2006.

Programme committee, Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2006), Monterey, CA USA, December 3-6, 2006.

Programme committee, Tenth IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2006), Malaga, Spain, October 2-6, 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.

Reviewer, Twentieth ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2006), Singapore, May 24-26, 2006.

Organising committee, International Workshop on Distributed Simulation on the Grid (DSGrid ’06), Singapore, May 19, 2006.

Programme committee, Fourth International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT ’06), Hakodate, Japan, May 8, 2006.

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