Background
I am a former industrial member of the Computational
Intelligence research group in the School of Computing at
RGU. My field of research is in evolutionary algorithms (specifically EDAs, see below). My interests
include modelling of fitness in evolutionary algorithms and real-world applications
but in general I find computing and especially AI fascinating. I am currently a Research Associate in
the Civil and Building Engineering department at Loughborough University;
and you can see my most recent work in my profile there.
In 2005 I graduated with a BSc First Class Honours in Computer Science from RGU, and in May 2009 I passed my PhD viva with minor corrections. The project I worked on looked at fitness modelling with Markov networks in Multivariate EDAs. My Supervisors were John McCall and Deryck Brown. I also had 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".
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.