Aladdin

The ALADDIN project, which uses agent-based technology to tackle natural and man-made disasters has just received the Aerospace and Defence award in this year’s Engineer Technology & Innovation Awards. The ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents For Decentralised Data and Information Networks) research programme is a multi-million pound multidisciplinary research project led by Professor Nick Jennings from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). It is a strategic research partnership funded by BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) which involves research groups in the University of Bristol, Oxford, and Imperial College London. ALADDIN focuses on developing techniques and technology to overcome the challenges facing different agencies involved in an emergency response.

An ECS-designed system which relies on computerised agents to act on its behalf during emergency scenarios has been awarded a RoboCupRescue championship prize. A team from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) was voted winner of the infrastructure competition in the RoboCupRescue World Championships (www.robocuprescue.org) which was held in Atlanta this month.

Professor Nick Jennings, ECS Professor of Computer Science, led a team which won the Trading-Agent Competition (TAC) - CAT Tournament which was held in Toronto in July. The other team members were Dr Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Dr Ioannis Vetsikas and Dr Raj Dash. The team is now developing this automated stock market further.

The essential problem posed by this competition is one that we all face in daily life. That is, how do we make good decisions in the face of uncertainty? Part of the answer to that question lies in making good assumptions. We are use to thinking of assumptions as bad things because we tend only to notice them when they are exposed in a negative light. However, that fact remains that, without taking risks on our assumptions, we would never achieve anything

A team of three researchers from the School of Electronics and Computer Science defeated agents designed by researchers from Princeton University, Brown University, Rutgers University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan to win the inaugural Lemonade Game Tournament, contested on the Web earlier this month and run by Yahoo! researcher Martin Zinkevich.

Congratulating the winners, Dick Olver, Chairman of BAE Systems said: "The Chairman's Awards are an opportunity to celebrate our most outstanding employee achievements and share best practices across the company for the benefit of our customers worldwide. The standard of entries was again incredibly high, making selection of the six gold award winners a very difficult challenge for the judging panels."