Background
I am currently a PhD candidate in the School of Computing at RGU. My field of research is
in the area of computational intelligence known as evolutionary algorithms (specifically EDAs, see below),
and the project I am working on looks at Markov Random Field Models in Multivariate EDAs.
My Supervisors are John McCall and
Deryck Brown, and I'm a member of the
Computational Intelligence research group. I also have an external supervisor, Qingfu Zhang
at the University of Essex. You can find information about some recent projects
I've been involved in under "Projects".
In 2005 I graduated with a BSc First Class Honours in Computer Science from RGU.
What exactly are EDAs?
Good question! Simply, Estimation of Distribution Algorithms are like genetic algorithms, but don't use crossover and mutation to build a new population each generation. Instead, they build a probabilistic model of the population, and generate a new population based on that. In practice there's a lot more to it than that; links to some EDA related websites can be found (unsuprisingly) under "Links" on the left, and you can find the beginning of a tutorial on EDAs too.