Nick Jennings (computer scientist)

"Nick Jennings" redirects here. For the animation director, see Nick Jennings (artist).
Nick Jennings

Jennings in April 2009
Born Nicholas Robert Jennings
15 December 1966
London, England
Residence Bishop's Waltham
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Joint Intentions as a Model of Multi-Agent Cooperation (1992)
Doctoral advisor Abe Mamdani[2][3]
Doctoral students
  • Peyman Faratin
  • Gopal Ramchurn
  • Rajdeep Dash
  • Bing Shi[4]
Known for
Notable awards
Spouse Dr Joanne Jennings
Website
users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj

Nicholas Robert Jennings FREng[5] FIEEE, FIET, FBCS CEng CITP (born 15 December 1966) is a Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government on National Security[6] and the inaugural Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. He is also an advisor to aerogility [7] and variab.ly.[8]

Jennings heads the Agents, Interaction and Complexity (AIC) Group[9] and is an internationally recognised authority in the areas of agent-based computing and intelligent systems. His research covers both the science and the engineering of such systems.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]

Education

Jennings was born in London. He grew up in Portland, Dorset, attended Weymouth Grammar School and studied for an undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Exeter. His PhD was from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London.[2]

Research

Jennings's research has been in the broad area of artificial intelligence[1] where he is an internationally recognised authority in the areas of agent-based computing and intelligent systems. Specifically, he has undertaken fundamental research on automated bargaining, auctions, mechanism design, trust and reputation, coalition formation and decentralised control. He has also pioneered the application of multi-agent technology; developing some of the first real-world systems—in domains such as business process management, energy systems/smart grids, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, and eDefence—and generally advocating the area of agent-oriented software engineering. His most recent project, ORCHID,[20] aims to develop the science of Human-Agent Collectives (HACs) in which humans and software agents collaborate in a seamless manner.

In undertaking this research, he has attracted grant income of over £23M (mainly from EPSRC[21]), published more than 500 articles (with some 300 co-authors[17]) and graduated 40 PhD students (including two winners and one runner-up of the BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Award.[22] He is recognised as highly cited by ISI Web of Science[23] in both the Engineering and the Computer Science categories. With over 50,000 citations in Google Scholar,[1] he is the second most highly cited researcher in the area of artificial intelligence (according to Microsoft Academic Search[16]) and has an h-index of 100 (the second top non-American according to Jens Palsberg[24]).

Career

From 1992 Jennings was at Queen Mary, University of London, where he was appointed to his first chair in 1998 (at the age of 31). In 1999, he moved to the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

From 2001 to 2008, he was Deputy Head of School (Research) in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and from 2008–2010 he was Associate Dean (Research & Enterprise) for the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths. Since 2011 he has been Head of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group.

Jennings was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and a founding director of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.[25] He has also led teams that have won competitions in the areas of: the Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma,[26] RoboCup (2007), Agent Trust and Reputation (the ART competitions in 2006 and 2007), the Lemonade Stand Game (2009 and 2010), competing marketplaces (2007), and technology-mediated social mobilisation and rapid information gathering (the US Department of State's Tag Challenge in 2012).

He was elected in 2005 as a Fellow[5] of the Royal Academy of Engineering[5]

In 2010 Jennings became a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and he was appointed the Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton in 2014.

Fellowships

Personal life

Nick is married to Jo and they have two children, Anna and Matthew. He is a keen sportsman: playing cricket for Bishops Waltham Cricket Club,[27] managing a youth football team Waltham Wolves,[28] and being a long-suffering West Ham United Football Club fan.

Awards

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Nick Jennings's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a free service provided by Google
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Jennings, Nicholas (1992). Joint intentions as a model of multi-agent cooperation in complex dynamic environments (PhD thesis). Queen Mary, University of London.
  3. ↑ Dubois, D.; Prade, H. (2012). "Abe Mamdani: A Pioneer of Soft Artificial Intelligence". Combining Experimentation and Theory. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing 271. p. 49. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-24666-1_4. ISBN 978-3-642-24665-4.
  4. ↑ Nick Jennings at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 "List of Fellows".
  6. ↑ http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/science-in-government/chief-scientific-advisers
  7. ↑ http://www.aerogility.com
  8. ↑ http://variab.ly/
  9. ↑ http://www.aic.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
  10. ↑ http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj Curriculum Vitae Nick Jennings
  11. ↑ Nick Jennings from the ACM Portal
  12. ↑ Nick Jennings's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
  13. ↑ Jennings, N. R. (2000). "On agent-based software engineering". Artificial Intelligence 117 (2): 277. doi:10.1016/S0004-3702(99)00107-1.
  14. ↑ Zambonelli, F.; Jennings, N. R.; Wooldridge, M. (2003). "Developing multiagent systems". ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 12 (3): 317. doi:10.1145/958961.958963.
  15. ↑ Jennings, N. R.; Faratin, P.; Lomuscio, A. R.; Parsons, S.; Wooldridge, M. J.; Sierra, C. (2001). "Automated Negotiation: Prospects, Methods and Challenges". Group Decision and Negotiation 10 (2): 199. doi:10.1023/A:1008746126376.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Nick Jennings's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
  18. ↑ Wooldridge, M.; Jennings, N. R. (2009). "Intelligent agents: Theory and practice". The Knowledge Engineering Review 10 (2): 115. doi:10.1017/S0269888900008122.
  19. ↑ Wooldridge, M.; Jennings, N. R. (1995). "Agent theories, architectures, and languages: A survey". Intelligent Agents. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 890. p. 1. doi:10.1007/3-540-58855-8_1. ISBN 978-3-540-58855-9.
  20. ↑ http://orchid.ac.uk
  21. ↑ Grants awarded to Nick Jennings by the EPSRC
  22. ↑ http://www.bcs.org/category/5820 BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Award
  23. ↑ http://www.highlycited.com/ ISI Web of Science
  24. ↑ http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html The h Index for Computer Science by Jens Palsbergg
  25. ↑ http://www.ifaamas.org
  26. ↑ [the 20th Anniversary competitions in 2004 and 2005
  27. ↑ http://bishopswaltham.play-cricket.com
  28. ↑ http://www.walthamwolves.co.uk
  29. ↑ http://sigai.acm.org/awards/autonomous_agents_award.html ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award