ECS

Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group at ECS

Professor Nick Jennings’ major research interests are in the science and the engineering of agent technology, artificial intelligence, and complex systems.

Nick is a man with a purpose, who has advanced rapidly through his career. At the young age of 22, he was offered his first academic post, before he had even published any papers, and he became a professor at the age of 31.

A year after he joined Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) he became head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, and shortly after that he became Deputy Head of School (Research). He has also served as the Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise for the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics. On 1 September 2011, Nick also became head of the new Agents, Interaction and Complexity group at ECS.

From as far back as he can remember, he was interested in Computer Science and studied it for O-level and A-level and then went on to Exeter to do a degree in the subject. His growing interest led him to do a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of London where he worked on a European Union project which looked at cooperating knowledge-based systems.

Nick left London to join ECS in 1999. “I joined because I was impressed by the size, quality and ambition of the department at Southampton. I had had a number of other offers at the time, but I was most impressed by Southampton and chose it over several departments that were better ranked at the time.”

At ECS, he continued his research into agent-based computing and he now leads one of the world’s most influential groups in this area. This research has been extremely highly cited - he has over 40,000 citations in Google Scholar, he is the most cited researcher in the area of artificial intelligence, and has an h-index of 84 which is the highest of any non-American Computer Scientist.

One of his most successful projects started in 2005. The ALADDIN project, which received £5.5 million from BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and lasted for five years, developed agents that can sense, act and interact in a wide range of emergency scenarios.

“These agents need to be effective in such challenging environments,” he said. “They need to be able to make best use of the information available, to be flexible and agile in their decision making, aware of the fact that there are other agents in the system, and adaptive to their changing environment.”

Research results from the project were pulled through into a number of real-world applications, covering the areas of decentralised fusion in airborne sensor networks, environmental modelling to help the UK Sailing Team in the 2012 Olympics, social network analysis in the security and intelligence analysis area, and coordination of multi-party supply chains.

Nick has now moved on to more projects which look at using agents in real world scenarios. In 2010, he began work on Orchid, a five-year programme grant, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council with significant investment from industry. ORCHID is developing and applying the science of ‘human-agent collectives’ - systems that symbiotically interleave human and software agents – to challenges in future energy networks, disaster response, and citizen science.

He is also researching the use of agents in the coming smart electricity grid to manage the country's energy distribution and consumption. He believes that this will rely on cooperation between autonomous software agents to control and manage itself.

“A centralised control system will fail because of the complexity of managing upwards of 20 million smart meters plus the power generation and distribution points,” he said. “We are developing agents that can ‘learn’ how much energy a building or home uses and which can then make predictions and decisions about cost-effective energy use,” he added. “We have already proved that agents can be used to haggle and resolve conflict, trade on the stock market and cope with disasters; our next challenge is to incorporate them into smart electricity meters.”

Nick has achieved much in the 12 years since he joined ECS. He has become one of the country’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence and has attracted over £20M of grant income for his work in this field.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. More recently still, he was appointed as a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government.

His research has also gained much recognition. He was the recipient of the Computers and Thought Award (the premier award for a young AI scientist and the only European winner in the award's 40 year history) in 1999 for his contributions to agent architectures and applications; the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2003; in 2007, the ARGUS II project won The Engineer’s Large Company/University Collaboration Award; in 2008, his group won Best Industrial Demonstrator award at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Systems Conference and in 2009, they won The Engineer Award for Best Aerospace and Defence Project for ALADDIN.

Now, with the bringing together of agents and complexity science, Nick sees his new group taking on big societal challenges.

“The bringing together of the holistic complexity science approach, with intelligent software agents and human problem solvers, is an amazing opportunity to do fundamentally new science. Moreover, the ensuing findings and insights can then be applied to some of the most pressing problems that face society today.”

For Nick, not only is ECS a fun, friendly place to be, but the fact that it encompasses both electronics and computer science means that it has the resources in-house to develop pervasive computing to its full potential and with Nick’s drive and determination, he will no doubt ensure that it does.