Teaching
I am course coordinator for the following courses, please see MyAberdeen for further details.
- CS2521 Algorithmic Problem Solving
- CS3027/5059 Robotics
- CS551K Agents and Multi-agent Systems
Undergraduate/MSc Projects
I have a wide range of undergraduate and MSc projects available for students, ranging from small research projects to implementation projects. Below are some suggestions, but I'm happy to discuss other project ideas, especially in the areas of argumentation, normative reasoning, computational trust and decision making.- Evolving Forgiveness When someone violates an obligation, sanctions are typically applied. For example, if you are caught speeding, you will have points deducted off your license. In human systems, people often consider mitigating circumstances when violations occur, often reducing or eliminating any punishment. One question is why this ability evolved. In this project, you will construct a simple simulation environment allowing for actions and penalties to occur, and will investigate different forgiveness strategies in order to identify whether any of these can improve the overall functioning of the system. This project is very open ended. You may use techniques ranging from machine learning (e.g. genetic programming) to argumentation.
- Synthetic argument generation This project involves investigating the structure of real arguments, and implementing a generator to produce ``similar'' arguments.
- implementation of an Argument Based Opponent Modelling System This project involves creating an argument based agent capable of reasoning about what argument to advance, and evaluating its performance.
- Improving the peer review process This project will use big data and machine learning techniques to investigate whether the peer review process of scientific publication can be improved.
- Improved timetabling This project will investigate whether timetabling of classes can be improved when compared to existing approaches.
- Virtual keyboard This project will investigate whether it is possible to use tapping frequency to simulate a keyboard on arbitrary objects.
- Optimising paper selection for REF The government's upcoming Research Excellence Framework places specific constraints on which papers are allowed to be submitted to it, posing an interesting optimisation problem. This project will solve this problem, and provide a student with a very broad view of optimisation problems in general.