David Robertson

David RobertsonDavid Robertson is Head of the School of Informatics. He is leader of the Software, Systems and Processes research group and Editor in Chief of the AI Review Journal and the Automated Experimentation journal. His main contribution to research in recent years has been to invent a new approach to coordinated knowledge sharing in distributed systems. To support this, he has defined an executable specification language (the Lightweight Coordination Calculus) for describing models of interactions, combining a process calculus specification language with an execution model drawn from logic programming. Using this language, his research group has developed new, practical solutions to problems such as: ontology mapping; service matchmaking; adaptive dialogue and distributed constraint management. The focus of this activity was created within the Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC, which was the main UK research initiative, and one of the largest ever EPSRC projects, in this area. With these experiments as proof of concept, he obtained funding for a large EU project (OpenKnowledge) that uses his style of interaction modelling in an operational system for discovering, sharing and enacting complex coordination in a peer-to-peer environment. He has recently been funded by EPSRC to continue this research as part of an EPSRC Programme grant on Social Machines.