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vicibus gratis formare loquentes suetus et alterno verum contexere nodo. Claudius Claudianus, 399 AD.
With skill at shaping urbane interchanges
Start-ups of students & colleagues: 3scale |
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Peter McBurney is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Informatics at King's College London. He is a member of the Agents and Intelligent Systems (AIS) Group of the Department. Between January 2004 and March 2006, McBurney was the Administrative Co-ordinator of the AgentLink III network, an EC-funded Co-ordination Action supporting European research and development in agent-based computing. The network comprised over 200 academic, research and industrial organizations from across Europe. In 2007, 2008 and 2009, he was founding GameMaster of the Market Design or CAT Tournament, sponsored by the Trading Agent Competition and the MBC Project. In 2011, he was Chair of the Innovative Applications Track at the 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2011), in Taipei, Taiwan. Since January 2007, McBurney has been joint Editor-in-Chief of the refereed journal, The Knowledge Engineering Review, published by Cambridge University Press. During 2008-2011, he is an invited Board Member of the Association for Trading Agent Research, organizers of the annual Trading Agent Competitions (TAC). As measured by research citations in August 2006, he is among the Top 1.2% of all computer scientists in the world. According to Google Scholar, McBurney has an h-index score of 36, and his most-cited publication has 414 citations. According to Microsoft Academic's rankings in January 2011, McBurney was the 65th most-cited Artificial Intelligence researcher in the world, and the second-highest ranked Australian, based on academic citations over the last 10 years. McBurney's research focuses on several areas in multi-agent software systems:
The design, analysis, and implementation of agent communications languages (ACLs) and protocols, to enable automated and rational interaction, argumentation, and dialog over action between machines. His research has primarily explored the formal semantics and pragmatics of ACLs and protocols. The practical value of McBurney's work in agent communications has been shown by a recent application, in work by PA Kodeswaran and colleagues, of the Fatio Protocol for multi-agent argumentation (developed with Simon Parsons) for the problem of resolving conflicting routing policies of distinct autonomous domains each using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), at the Network Layer (Layer 3) of the standard Internet stack. He has published over 180 papers (124 refereed), 6 books and 14 monographs. He has applied successfully for research grants from the Arts Council of England (ACE), the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) programme, the Ford Foundation, the US Department of Labor, the Canadian Agency for International Development, and the International Labor Organization (ILO). In total, these grants have amounted to some GBP 11 million in research funding. He has undertaken inter-disciplinary research projects with economists, philosophers, pure mathematicians, epidemiologists and a composer. McBurney has the University Medal in Mathematical Statistics from the Australian National University, Canberra, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool. In 1985-1986, as Chairman of the Department of Business Studies at the University of Zimbabwe, he led the creation of majority-ruled Southern Africa's first MBA programme. In 1991, he was appointed Chairman of an ad-hoc European Commission Working Party exploring future technology needs of the Publishing and Media industries (Eurinfo); among its achievements was the first detailed specification for an e-book. In both 2002 and 2005 he was co-author of an EC-sponsored report on the future of agent-based computer technologies, the AgentLink Agent Technologies Roadmap. He has undertaken proposal or project reviews for research funding agencies in Austria, Belgium, Canada, the EC, Finland, Flanders, Israel, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and the UK (EPSRC, ESRC and BBSRC). He has been an official examiner for numerous PhD candidates in Australia, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the USA, and he has successfully supervised 6 PhD students and 1 MPhil student to completion. A list of his current PhD students can be found here. As a management consultant, McBurney has advised the world's leading IT and Telecommunications companies on marketing strategy, implementation planning and strategic programming, and his clients have included: AT&T, British Telecom, Charoen Pokphand, Dallah Albaraka, Ericsson, GTE, ICO Global, Inmarsat, Kolon, NYNEX, O2, Omnipoint, Pegaso Telecomunicaciones, Qualcomm, Reliance Telecom, Sampoerna Telekomunikasi, Singapore Telecom, Teledesic, US WEST, and the World Insurance Network. McBurney has been an invited co-editor of special issues of the refereed journals, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (here and here), E-Commerce Research and Applications, IEEE Intelligent Systems, The Knowledge Engineering Review, and Synthese/Knowledge, Rationality and Action. He has helped organize a AAAI Symposium on Chance Discovery, a UK Multi-Agent Systems (UKMAS) Meeting (Liverpool 2002), three AgentLink Technical Forums, two AgentLink Agent Technology Conferences, a Workshop on Technical Standards in Agent Systems, a Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems and Complexity, two workshops on Market-Based Control of Complex Computational Systems, the Second International Workshop on Computational Social Choice, and three editions of the TAC Market Design (CAT) Tournament; he is also a founding member of the Steering Committee of the International Workshop series on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems, held annually since 2004, and Chair of the ArgMAS Workshops from 2009 to 2013 (inclusive).
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