NEWS
October 2011
Liverpool University Professor awarded £2million ERC Advanced Grant
Professor Mike Wooldridge of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics, and Computer Science has been awarded a £2million Advanced Grant from the European Research Council to develop the theory and tools to understand how economic factors and self-interested behaviour affect the way that computer systems function.
This area of research is both timely and necessary, as current tools for analysing computer systems fail to take into account economic factors, which are prevalent in settings such as e-commerce.
Professor Wooldridge said: "This research grant confirms the international reputation of the Department of Computer Science for fundamental and applied research particularly in the area of artificial intelligence."
The European Research Council (ERC) supports high-quality research in Europe through a competitive, peer-reviewed funding programme. The prestigious ERC Advanced Grant scheme, under which RACE is funded, is intended to support internationally leading researchers. The University of Liverpool currently hosts two other ERC Advanced Grants, held by Prof Matt Rosseinsky (Department of Chemistry), and Prof John Dainton (Department of Physics).
iPad App for Teaching AI Reaches 900 Downloads Internationally
AITicTacToe, an iPad app to allow school children to explore the Artificial Intelligence behind the game "Noughts and Crosses", has now reached 900 downloads internationally. Developed by Dr Terry Payne in Computer Science, the app allows users to explore how different heuristic rules can be ordered and combined to form an optimal strategy for playing this simple game. The app has been used to demonstrate simple notions of AI within the Computer Science's outreach program to local school, garnering an enthusiastic reception from A-level pupils and teachers alike. A new version, featuring min-max search and supporting multi-device tournaments is in preparation.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aitictactoe/id449047791?ls=1&mt=8
Dr Terry Payne Awarded the SWSA 10 Year Distinguished Paper Award at ISWC 2011
Terry Payne has been awarded the SWSA 10 Year Distinguished Paper Award for his contribution to the paper "DAML-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services" [1], originally published at the Semantic Web Working Symposium in 2001 [2]. The award was instigated this year by the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) to recognises the highest impact papers in the field of the Semantic Web over the last 10 years. The announcement was made at the 2011 International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany.
This seminal paper [1] was the first to propose how the "DARPA Agent Markup Language" could be used to represent both Agent Capabilities and Web Services using a logically-supported knowledge representation language in a sharable and computationally comprehendible way. These descriptions could then be used for discovery, consumption and planning within open, decentralised systems. It later evolved into OWL-S, and led the way to the creation of the Semantic Web Services field, which has since seen contributions such as SAWSDL and WSMO, and ultimately led to the W3C candidate recommendation on "OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services" [3] in 2004.
Ankolenkar, A., Burstein, M., Hobbs, J., Lassila, O., Martin, D., McIlraith, S., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Payne, T. R., Sycara, K. and Zeng, H. DAML-S: A Semantic Markup Language For Web Services. In: Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS), Stanford University, CA, July 2001.
[1] http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/9170/
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20021206040039/www.semanticweb.org/SWWS/
[3] http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/