Peter McBurney

Research

My research interests are:

• Multi-agent systems
  
• Agent communications languages and interaction protocols
  
• Agent-oriented software engineering
  
• Argumentation theory
  
• Complex decision-making, and its automation
  
• Market mechanism design
  
• Trading agents, options and derivatives
  
• Agent-based simulation modeling, particularly of economic and social domains
  
• Complex systems theory and application.

My research has been motivated by the challenge of automating complex group decision-making under uncertainty, and this has led me to the philosophy of argumentation and of language, the design of communications languages and protocols for systems of autonomous agents, the use of algebraic topology and category theory, and the ideas of political philosophy, particularly theories of deliberative democracy. You can read more about my activities by following the links on this page.

• My PhD Thesis: Rational Interaction

• A partial list of my research activities:
  • Automated decision-making under uncertainty

  • Chance Discovery, Risk Analysis and e-Commerce (being three applications of automated decision-making).

    • My book on Chance Discovery, a collection of papers co-edited with Yukio Ohsawa, was published by Springer in their Advanced Information Processing series.

  • Protocols for rational interaction between autonomous agents (providing mechanisms to automate complex decision-making), such as those to be found engaged in e-commerce and e-government.

    • From 2004 to 2006, I was the Administrative Co-ordinator of the AgentLink III network, an EC-funded co-ordination action to support R&D in agent-based computing.

    • I was an investigator in the EU FP6 Personalized Information for Life and Health Services (PIPS) project, which designed and built intelligent electronic health and nutrition service delivery platforms.

    • A list of the Protocols I have co-developed can be found here.

  • Applications of argumentation theory in Artificial Intelligence (being means to enable rational interaction)

    • I was an investigator in the EU FP6 Argumentation Service Platform with Integrated Components (ASPIC) project, which designed and built re-usable components for argumentation-based systems.

  • Algebraic topological and category-theoretic methods in Computer Science (being means to study the formal properties of interaction protocols, particularly the class of all protocols, its sub-classes and their features)

  • Deployment of deliberative models of democracy in the design of multi-agent systems (being means to ensure rationality in group decision-making, both instrumental and communicative, and means to increase the extent of semantic verifiability of agent communications languages)

  • Qualitative and category-theoretic models of complex systems.