The AIP
Over the last year, the Department funded several visits to and from Bath in support of collaborative research efforts via our Academic Interchange Programme. The activities and outcomes of these visits are summarized below. Seven visits have been funded, five incoming and two outgoing. Two further proposals were approved but the visits have not taken place.
Concrete outcomes to date include one joint paper accepted for publication in December 2010, a two-year international research project funded in December 2010, an LMS Scheme 4 travel grant, and an EU FP7 bid due to be submitted in January 2011.
Martijn Warnier visiting Julian Padget
Details of visit
Martijn Warnier, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, TU Delft, visited for one week in September 2010.
Activities
Discussed FP7 ICT work programme 2011-2012 for potentially relevant calls
Discussed small-scale research projects about to be undertaken by final year students (Bath and Delft) and their relationship to the larger programme for the development and application of the Agentscape platform. Padget has three final year students doing AS related projects.
Identified new small-scale projects for the future.
Warnier discussed computer security (this is the area of his PhD) with PhD student Gideon Bibu and provided some helpful direction.
Warnier also discussed PhD student Tina Balke’s research with her and provided some useful direction.
Revised a paper that had been presented at a workshop last May (no proceedings) for submission to a conference; see below.
Made plans for next visit.
Outcomes
Joint paper An Agent-Based Infrastructure for Energy Profile Capture and Management accepted for publication in 2011 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control (ICNSC 2011).
Have started putting together consortium for EU bid for call on smart grids. Deadline is January 2012. A further visit from Warnier took place in December 2010.
John Power visiting Martin Hyland
Details of visit
Power visited Hyland in Cambridge for four days in April 2010.
Activities
Discussed joint research, also involving Richard Garner (Macquarie), about a generalisation of Lawvere theories.
Outcomes
Ongoing discussions concerning a joint grant proposal in the area of game semantics.
Giuseppe Rosolini visiting Guy McCusker
Details of visit
Rosolini visited Bath for one week in July 2010.
Activities
Held research discussions with McCusker and Power, and attended the Wessex Theory Seminar on July 13th, including giving a talk. McCusker, Power and Rosolini used the discussion time to develop International Joint Project proposal, which was submitted to the Royal Society at the end of July 2010.
Outcomes
International Joint Project application was successful, providing £11950 of travel funding to be used to support joint research over the next two years.
Alessandra Mileo visiting Marina De Vos
Details of visit
Mileo visited Bath for five days in April 2010.
Activities
Discussing in detail the basic building blocks of a general policy language. Spoke with colleagues in management about their work in the health-care sector and talking about possible joint interest. Discussed the various ways of obtaining funding for international research collaborations.
Outcomes
The discussion on policy languages in the context of assisted/independent living and Mileo’s move to DERI, Galway, Ireland made it possible to start considering a European Framework 7 application. The team has identified an appropriate call (FP-7 ICT-5.4 and STREP) and are currently writing the proposal and finalising the consortium. Currently have four academic partners and two SME’s signed up. Bath will be the coordinator and expect the budget be between 3 and 4 million euro. The deadline is 18 January 2011.
Once the EU proposal has been submitted, work will begin on a more technical proposal on policy languages.
Boris Shapiro visiting Nicolai Vorobjov
Details of visit
Shapiro visited Bath for one week in August 2010
Activities
During the visit, Shapiro and Vorobjov started to research a topic which had been discussed before by email. It is the study of real zeroes of the solutions of linear ordinary differential equations of order k (with
complex coefficients). Some preliminary findings were summed up in a preliminary report. In the months after the visit a narrower problem emerged. This is the proof of a possible upper bound on the number of zeroes in terms of just k for the equations in which this number is finite. Since the solutions of differential equations in question are exponential sums, Prof Boris Zilber (Mathematical Institute, Oxford) was invited to participate in the project; he is the world authority in exponentiation.
Outcomes
A joint paper of Shapiro, Vorobjov and Zilber is in preparation.
As a follow-up, Vorobjov visited Prof Shapiro in Stockholm on 25-28 October 2010 and continued the work on the project, funded by Stockholm. Vorobjov has obtained LMS Scheme 4 funding for a further visit in March 2011.
Frank Van Reeth visiting the MTRC group
Details of visit
Van Reeth (Hasselt, Belgium) visited Bath for two days in June 2010.
Activities
Van Reeth gave two seminars and two demonstrations to the MTRC group and held informal research discussions with them.
Outcomes
Further exchanges are planned between the MTRC group and Van Reeth, and Van Reeth may be included in a future FP7 bid coming from Bath.
Darren Cosker visiting Weta Digital
Details of visit
Cosker’s travel to New Zealand was funded by the Academic Interchange Programme to enable him to combine a conference presentation at the Asian Conference for Computer Vision with a research visit to Weta in November 2010.
Activities
In addition to presenting a paper at ACCV, Cosker fostered relationships with Weta, a world leading and 5 time Oscar winning visual effects studio. He gave a talk there outlining his research achievements and current projects including facial segmentation maps and dense correspondence of facial data. He met with several of the R&D team at Weta, including J P Lewis, Peter Hillman, Abhijeet Ghosh, Mark Sagar and Sebastian Sylwan.
Meetings with Mark Sagar, head of special projects at Weta, helped Cosker to clarify several research directions and problems of mutual interest.
Outcomes
Cosker hopes for future collaborations with Weta on the projects identified as being of interest both to academia and industry. His own Research Fellowship will be able to fund a future visit should such collaborations become more concrete.
Cyril Brom visiting Joanna Bryson
Details of visit
Cyril Brom and Jan Havlíček of Charles University Prague visited Bath from 5-9th May 2010. The Department paid for Prof. Brom’s travel; Brom & Bryson split the costs for Havlíček.
Activities
On the afternoon of 6th of May, Brom lead a course on AI for games which was attended by about twenty under- and post-graduate students. On the afternoon of 7th May, Havlíček lead a session of game development with Prague’s Pogamut system. Pogamut (among other things) extends the work Bath has conducted on constructing and analysing dynamic plans for game agents. In addition to this, Bryson & Brom met on the morning of 7th May and all day the 8th of May, exchanging the current state of the art of our action selection projects and making plans for future research and grant applications.
Outcomes
Bryson is involved in a five-year funded project held at Prague as a “foreign expert”. This visit clarified her role and the fact that she will be co-author on at least one paper coming from the project.
Brom’s team agreed to be part of an EU project in development.