Professor Jan Sykulski, Head of the Electrical Power Engineering Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, visited Poland last month to receive the title of Professor from the President of the Polish Republic. In Poland professorial titles are awarded by the state, on the nomination of a university, and as a mark of his personal distinction, Professor Sykulski was nominated by the Universities of Lodz, Poznan, and Szczecin. He received the title from President Aleksander Kwasniewski during a formal ceremony in Warsaw.

The answer is yes, and not only that: they can also evaluate what will be the most successful strategy for conflict resolution, including re-formulating their action, or evading confrontation. Argument is used by computer agents only as the last resort.

The effectiveness of argumentation-based negotiation (ABN) for computer agents operating in multi-agent systems is assessed in a new paper co-authored by Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Professor Jennings will be presenting the paper next week in New York, at AAMAS 2004, one of the largest conferences in the world of computer research.

Agents are autonomous computer systems increasingly used in a wide range of industrial and commercial domains, including robotics, e-commerce, computer games, and information retrieval. They are regarded as one of the most significant new technologies in computer science--not only a promising new technology, but also a new way of thinking, fundamental to the successful development of the next generation of distributed, open and dynamic computer systems.

Professor Jennings is co-chair of AAMAS 2004, and leads a large UK contingent of computer scientists to the conference. He is one of the world"s leading exponents of agent technology and helped pioneer the use of agent-based techniques for real-world applications.

"Conflicts are inevitable in a multi-agent system," says Professor Jennings, "in which autonomous entities pursue their own goals. If the agents are to be able to resolve these problems—which can arise due to pressure on resources or as a result of conflicts of information—then ABN provides a meaningful interaction, enabling the agents to work towards the best result."

"Artificial intelligence programmes of this kind can deal with difficult problems and aid humans in many difference environments. For this reason they are increasingly being used in the Internet, in our homes, and in the workplace," he adds "But to improve their performance, we need to ensure they have the ability to overcome real-world problems such as conflict."

A crucial aspect of agents is their potential in e-commerce. "Worldwide markets become ever more complex," says Professor Jennings, "and time frames narrow. Companies are keen to automate parts of their activities and we are aiming to design programmes that can mirror and occasionally improve human decision-making."

Researchers at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science have welcomed the conclusions of the report into the future of academic publishing conducted by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, and published today.

The Committee has recommended that all researchers should self-archive their papers within a month of publication, and that universities should be funded to provide the facilities to allow them to do this. This fulfils the vision and principles under which the ECS scientists have been working, as part of the Open Access movement. 'The Committee's conclusions, if followed by universities in this country, will improve the visibility and impact of UK research,' says Dr Les Carr, who has been leading the digital archiving research at ECS.

ECS researchers have been at the forefront of the Open Access movement, promoting and demonstrating the benefits of Open Access archiving of research output, as well as developing software to allow institutions to easily set up their own archives (software.eprints.org). Their work has been funded by JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) and has been instrumental in advancing the Open Access debate.

'In a move two years ago that prefigured the conclusions of the parliamentary report, it was made mandatory for our own researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science to self-archive all their research papers, resulting in the most populated institutional archive in the UK (eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk),' said Dr Carr. 'This has provided a very positive and personal example to us of the benefits that can derive from Open Access. Everyone wants to see their research papers reaching as wide an audience as possible and Open Access provides the best way to achieve this.'

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, received an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University at their graduation ceremony on 13 July. The fellowship to Professor Hall recognized her distinction in computer science, and her presidency this year of the British Computer Society. In her graduation address Professor Hall highlighted the imbalance between the high proportion of women graduating in the life sciences, and the much smaller number graduating in engineering and computer science. Emphasizing that future developments in advanced knowledge technologies and biologically-inspired computing would require the skills and expertise that women could contribute, she urged all the graduates, but especially the women in the audience, to be assertive, bold, and confident in pursuing their future careers.