i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 28 September 2009

Previous Newsletters

New head of School Dr Maria Fasli

Dr Maria Fasli is the new Head of School, following Dr Sam Steel who served in the post for three years. Maria has been at the University of Essex since 1996 when she started her PhD in the Department of Computer Science in formal theories for intelligent agents. She obtained her PhD in 2000 and since then she has been a member of staff at Essex. She has been carrying out research in formal theories of agents and multi-agent systems and applications in e-commerce and she is the author of the book “Agent Technology for E-commerce” (John Wiley and Sons, 2007). She has also been working on web search assistants and support systems and semantically enhanced search for web service discovery and composition. Apart from her discipline-based research interests, she is also interested in innovative approaches to learning and teaching. In 2005, Dr Fasli was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for her innovations in learning and teaching. In 2007, she was promoted to Senior Lecturer and she took over as Head of the (merged since 2007) School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering on 1 August 2009.

Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents (CCFEA) joins CSEE

From 1 August 2009, CCFEA (The Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents) becomes part of the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE). This reflects the significant emphasis on computing in CCFEA. CCFEA will retain its strong identity as a leading international centre for computational finance offering teaching at the highest levels and pursing cutting-edge research.  It will continue to do interdisciplinary research in collaboration with members in the Economics Department and the Essex Business School. It will also continue to work with external experts in finance and economics.

Staff News

Recent Promotions

Several research-active members of staff in our School have been promoted from 1 October 2009.

Simon Lucas

Simon Lucas has been promoted to Professor.  He joined the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering as a Lecturer in 1992 having completed his PhD and a one-year post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Southampton.  He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Computer Science in 2000 and Reader in 2003.  His main research interests are machine learning and games and he is the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

Qingfu Zhang

Qingfu Zhang has been promoted to Professor.  He was appointed as Lecturer in Computer Science in 2000 and promoted to Reader in 2006. Before joining Essex, he worked in Hong Kong, Bonn and Manchester as a researcher for four years. His main research areas are evolutionary computation, optimization, neural networks, data analysis and their applications. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics — Part B and the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. He received the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Award.

Udo Kruschwitz

Udo Kruschwitz has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. He joined the Department of Computer Science as a Research Officer way back in 1997 and was appointed as Lecturer in 2000. He has since worked on a variety of research projects focusing on information retrieval and natural language engineering, a subject that he also teaches to undergraduate students.

As part of his professional activities he is programme co-chair of the 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval to be held at the Open University in March 2010.

Congratulations to all of them!

Welcome (back) to the School: new KTP Associate appointed

A new Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project involving Jobserve and the School of Computer Science and Electronic Systems has officially started on 1 September. As reported previously, this is a two-year strategic partnership aimed at applying cutting-edge technology in natural language processing, machine learning and knowledge acquisition in commercial applications.
 
We are pleased to announce that Dr Yevgeniya (Jenya) Kovalchuk has been appointed to work on this project as KTP Associate. Many of you will know that Jenya has only just finished her PhD in July and we are happy that she has accepted our offer following a very competitive interviewing stage. Jenya will spend most of her time at Jobserve in Tiptree where she works closely with the company supervisors James Wren and Duncan Butler. Simon Lucas and Udo Kruschwitz are the academic supervisors. Jenya's university office will be the Natural Language Engineering (NLE) lab. We are looking forward to an exciting project!

PhD Awards

Mohamed Bader El Den

Congratulations to Mohamed Bader El Den who passed his PhD viva with minor corrections. His thesis is on the use of Genetic Programming as a Hyper-heuristic. Hyper-heuristics are search algorithms that searches the space of search algorithms and, more generally, problem solvers. Mohamed, who was funded by an EPSRC research grant studentship, submitted his thesis and passed his viva in well under 4 years.

Mohamed has successfully evolved competitive very SAT solvers and time-tabling algorithms. The work has appeared in numerous papers in international conferences and one journal paper to appear in the Memetic Computing journal.  

Mohamed has a research fellowship position in Loughborough and is currently spending 3 months at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

Andreas Konstantinidis

Andreas Konstantinidis passed his viva with a very few minor corrections last week on 23 September 2009.  Andreas, co-supervised by Professor Qingfu Zhang and Dr Kun Yang, completed his EPSRC funded PhD with 4 years.  His PhD thesis is on multiobjective optimization for wireless sensor network design. He has produced 2 international journal papers and 8 conference papers. During his PhD study, he chaired a session in the Congress of Evolutionary Computation 2009 and co-organized the PhD Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference at Essex in 2009. He won a student travel grant from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in 2009. Andreas will be a visiting lecturer at the University of Frederick and the University of Cyprus. He has been very recently invited to be a co-investigator for 3 research proposals by the University of Cyprus.

We wish Andreas a very successful and happy future in his sunny home country.

Wang Yu

Wang Yu (aka Michael) has recently passed his PhD viva with minor corrections. The title of his thesis was 'A Low-Complexity Distributed Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks'. We congratulate Michael on his achievement and wish him every success in the future.

International Broadcasting Convention (IBC)

CSEE was well-represented at the annual International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) at Amsterdam this year. The Conference Programme was organised by Visiting Fellow, Professor David Crawford, and featured a Panel Session with Chinwe Abose, a PhD student from the Photonics Group, plus other students from around the world talking about the different ways that they consume content. The Photonics Group also supported a stand in the New Technology Campus in the IBC Exhibition Halls, and Professor Mohammed Ghanbari contributed to a joint technical paper that featured in the IET Journal “Best of IET and IBC”, which was published for the Convention.

Papers Published

Riccardo Poli, Mean and Variance of the Sampling Distribution of Particle Swarm Optimizers During Stagnation, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 13(4): 712--721, Aug 2009

Riccardo Poli, Nicholas Freitag McPhee, Luca Citi and Ellery Crane, Memory with Memory in Genetic Programming, Journal of Artificial Evolution and Applications, Volume 2009 (2009), 16 pages, doi:10.1155/2009/570606

Riccardo Poli, Caterina Cinel, Luca Citi and Francisco Sepulveda, Reaction-time Binning: a Simple Method for Increasing the Resolving Power of ERP Averages, Psychophysiology, forthcoming.   

Riccardo Poli, Luca Citi, Francisco Sepulveda, and Caterina Cinel, Analogue Evolutionary Brain Computer Interfaces, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, November 2009

M. Bader-El-Den, R. Poli and S. Fatima, Evolving  Timetabling Heuristics using a  Grammar-based Genetic Programming Hyper-heuristic Framework, Memetic Computing, forthcoming.