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Department Report 1998 |
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Department Report 1998 |
The department continues to enjoy good health. Our research grant income and our publication rate are at their highest level ever, as are the numbers of undergraduates and taught postgraduates.
Our staff, students and former students continue to achieve success in many diverse areas. A paper entitled Finding frequent substructures in chemical compounds by Ross King and co-authors was voted the best paper in the applications category of the prestigious Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, under the auspices of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Edel Sherratt's paper entitled Non-monotonic Reasoning and Formal Software Development was adjudged the best paper at the 1st Irish Workshop on Formal Methods. A team of second year students won first prize in the University's Student Skills Competition and were especially commended for their success in obtaining sponsorship from many companies including Activa, BAe Sema, and Sun Microsystems. Matthew White, who was awarded a Master of Engineering degree in Software Engineering, with first class honours, won first prize in the IT category of the 11th annual WDA Technology Prize Competition. He was also a finalist for the 1998 British Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards. Robert Walker, a second year MEng student, won first place in the Student Ada Programming Competition, run by Ada UK in conjunction with GEC Marconi.
But the most spectacular success was undoubtedly the achievement of Dr Jan Pinkava, who holds a first class honours degree and a PhD from the department, and won an Oscar in 1998 for his animated short film Geri's Game.
Among the visitors the department has been pleased to welcome during 1998 were Professor Jon Crowcroft from University College, London, Dr Paul Chung from Loughborough University, Professor Bill Frakes of Virginia Tech, and Dr Albert Yeap from New Zealand.
The year saw considerable changes in the academic staff of the department, with Martin Lawton retiring and Nick Gotts, Patrick Olivier and John Hunt leaving for pastures new. We wish them all well and, in their place, welcome Bjørn Alsberg, Roy Featherstone, Helen Fuell and Chris Loftus.
The 1998/99 session sees the launch of two new degree schemes, one in Interactive Multimedia Engineering and one in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. A third new scheme, Computing and Telematics, is under development. These schemes build on the department's strengths and have few competitors in the established universities. It is hoped that they will increase the supply of high quality applicants to the department. Because of the 21 month gap between the copy date for the UCAS Handbook and the arrival of the students who will have used it, it will be some time before the success of these new schemes can be judged.
Student recruitment continues to be buoyant and, at 119, the number of first year honours students is higher than it has ever been. Such large numbers lead both to physical difficulties, resulting from the size of lecture theatres and teaching laboratories, to increased pressure on staff, and to less tangible problems arising from the difficulty of maintaining personal contact between staff and students. In the latter regard, the two weekends that the first year students spend at Aberdyfi become increasingly valuable as the size of the class increases. The contacts made between staff and students at those weekends last throughout the students' time in the department. Over the years the support, in terms both of money and staff time, that these weekends have received from industry has grown steadily and we are determined to continue with them, notwithstanding the substantial costs.
Some of the physical problems arising from the large class sizes are being alleviated by our own technological developments. The prototype of the Remote Advisory Service, which allows students at a workstation to obtain advice from an advisor in a central location, was developed in the department in 1995. With the support of the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Funding Councils, this has been developed into a fully operational system that is being distributed to universities across the UK.
Our links with institutions overseas continue to grow and lead to an increasing number of their students spending time studying in Aberystwyth. Twenty five students from Informatics in Singapore spent three weeks in the department at the end of June, studying artificial intelligence, as part of their BSc course validated by the University of Wales. Five students from Universidad Antonio de Nebrija in Madrid and one student from the University of Puget Sound in the USA spent one semester of the 1998/99 session with us.
We now offer our MSc course in Singapore on a part-time basis, through a series of intensively taught modules. Many members of the department have visited Singapore to teach on this course and a first batch of 12 students have now successfully completed the taught part of the course and are about to embark on the dissertation phase.
Members of the department's academic staff continue to be in demand as external examiners for courses in other institutions. In 1998, they examined at the Open University and at the universities of Bournemouth, Huddersfield, Lancaster, Reading and York.
The work of the Advanced Reasoning Group on the use of model-based reasoning for design analysis has now reached the stage of successful industrial exploitation. AutoSteve, a package for carrying out automated failure mode effects analysis of car electrical systems, is now installed and in use at the Ford Motor Company in the United States. The University has licensed the software to a new company, specially formed to market and develop it; a significant number of sales are expected during 1999. This graphically illustrates the long lead times needed to take basic research into industrial exploitation: the basic research that underlies AutoSteve started 14 years ago. Research will continue in the department to extend the application of the techniques to other kinds of engineering design analysis.
The Reasoning Group's reputation is exemplified by its role as coordinators of 'MONET', a Europe-wide 'network of excellence' involving industrialists, academics and researchers in Model Based Systems & Qualitative Reasoning, which is funded by the European Commission. The success of the initial two year funding period has led to the recent award to the group of a substantial continuation grant.
Our research in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology has continued to flourish. Grants in this field currently total £1.6M, many of which are held jointly with the Institute of Biological Sciences. The underlying theme of this work, in which Aberystwyth holds a leading position, is the development of machine learning techniques and their application in areas such as the analysis of gene function, and improved methods for drug design and development. The group enjoys close academic collaboration with complementary groups at UMIST and at the Universities of York and Oxford; industrial collaborators include Glaxo and other major pharmaceutical companies. The computing facilities have recently been enhanced by the installation of a 'Beowulf Cluster' - not a broadening of our interdisciplinary interests into Anglo-Saxon poetry but a cluster of 25 interconnected computers capable of working in parallel to tackle computationally intensive tasks in machine learning.
The Intelligent Robotics Group has begun a new BBSRC-funded project, the aim of which is to develop robot sensing and control techniques that will enable robots to be taught how to assemble snack food products by showing them examples of the finished products. This capability is a key to increasing the levels of automation in the snack food industry, which is characterised by frequent changes of product type, and which experiences difficulty in recruiting workers prepared to accept the chilled factory environment essential for hygiene. The project has the benefit of collaboration with food manufacturers and equipment suppliers. The year has also seen refurbishment of the Robotics Laboratory, which now houses four industrial robots and an area for experimental work with small mobile robots.
Members of the academic staff of the department have served as external examiners for research degrees in the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Southampton, Wollongong and York.
The Telematics Group in the department is very active in providing advice, assistance and training through its participation in several projects funded by the European Union and intended to encourage the use of modern telecommunications within rural Wales and elsewhere.
The group provides a technical support centre for the Pathway project. This project is led by Powys County Council and involves all nine of the unitary authorities in rural Wales, the Welsh Development Agency, training and educational organisations, and many small and medium sized companies. The objective of the project is to "introduce the Information Society to rural Wales." In a related project, the group, in collaboration with the Department of Information and Library Studies, is providing expertise to assist the businesses of Ceredigion to exploit the potential benefits of the Internet.
In collaboration with the Department of European Languages, the group has been participating in a project led by University College, London to evaluate the potential of Internet-based video-conferencing systems. Related to this is the work that it has done in 'webcasting' (that is, broadcasting using the Internet as the transmission medium) a series of prestigious European conferences and workshops.
Alsberg, B K, Wade, W G and Goodacre, R 1998. Chemometric analysis of diffuse reflectance-absorbance Fourier transform infrared spectra using rule induction methods: application to the classification of Eubacterium species. Applied Spectroscopy, 52(6), 72-102.
Alsberg, B K, Kell, D B and Goodacre, R 1998. Variable selection in discriminant partial least squares analysis. Analytical Chemistry, 70(19), 4126-4133.
Alsberg, B K, Woodward, A M, Winson, M K, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1998. Variable selection in wavelet regression models. Analytica Chimica Acta, 368, 29-44.
Bott, M F 1998. Financial models of Software Component Reuse. In: Proc. FESMA '98. 213-222.
Chantler, M J, Coghill, G M, Shen, Q and Leitch, R R 1998. Selecting tools and techniques for Model-based diagnosis. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, 12(1), 81-98.
Cohn, A G, Gotts, N M, Cui, Z, Randell, D A, Bennett, B and Gooday, J M. 1998. Exploiting Temporal Continuity in Qualitative Spatial Calculi. In: Golledge, R G and Egenhofer, M J (eds), Spatial and Temporal Reasoning in Geographical Information Systems. Oxford University Press.
Dehaspe, L, Toivonen, H and King, R D 1998. Finding frequent substructures in chemical compounds. In: Agrawal, R, Stolorez, P and Piatetsky, G (eds), The fourth international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. AAAI Press, Menlo Park, for AAAI.
Dehaspe, L, Toivonen, H and King, R D 1998. Finding frequent substructures in chemical compounds. In: Verdenius, F and van den Broek, W (eds), Proc. of the 8th Belgian-Dutch conference on machine learning (BENELEARN-98). Technical report 352, ATO-DLO, Wageningen, Holland. 21-29.
Demistichas, P, Westerhuis, F, Guyot, Loftus, C, Sherratt, E and Anagnostou, M 1998 (May). Service creation environment for open distributed telecommunication architectures. In: ICIN'98.
Featherstone, R, Sonck, S and Khatib, O 1998. A general contact model for dynamically decoupled force/motion control. In: Casals, A and de Almeida, A T (eds), Experimental Robotics V, 5th Int. Symp. Experimental Robotics. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer-Verlag, 128-139.
Gilbert, R J, Goodacre, R, Shann, B, Taylor, J, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1998. Genetic programming based variable selection for high dimensional data. In: Koza, J R, Banzhaf, W, Chellapilla, K, Deb, K, Dorigo, M, Fogel, D B, Garzon, M H, Goldberg, D E, Iba, H and Riolo, R L (eds), Genetic Programming 1998: Proc. 3rd Annual Conference. San Francisco, CA. Morgan Kaufmann, 109-115.
Holstein, H and Boyce, D 1998. An animated computer model of the human foot. In: IEE colloquium on computer vision. IEE. Ref 1998/433, 12/1-2.
Hunt, J E 1998. Essential JavaBeans Fast. Springer-Verlag.
Hunt, J E 1998. Java and JDBC. Application Developer Adviser, May.
Hunt, J E 1998. Java and Object orientation : An introduction. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540- 76201-9.
Hunt, J E 1998. Writing real time systems the Java way. Application Development Adviser, 1(3), 34-37.
Hunt, J E and Long, F W 1998. Building high integrity systems in Java. In: Proc. BCS Object Technology '98.
Hunt, J E and Long, F W 1998. Implementing assertions in Java. Java Developers Journal, 3(1).
Hunt, J E and McManus, A 1998. Key Java: Tips and techniques. Springer-Verlag.
Hunt, J E, Timmis, J, Cooke, D, Neal, M and King, C 1998. Jisys: The development of an Artificial Immune System for real world applications. In: Dipankar Dasgupta (ed) Artificial Immune Systems and their Applications Springer-Verlag.
Jones, A, Young, D, Taylor, J, Kell, D B and Rowland, J J 1998. Quantification of microbial productivity via multi-angle light scattering and supervised learning. Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 59(2), 131-143.
Kell, D B, Winson, M K, Goodacre, R, Woodward, A M, Alsberg, B K, Jones, A, Timmins, E and Rowland, J J 1998. DRASTIC (Diffuse Reflectance Absorbance Spectroscopy Taking In Chemometrics). A novel, rapid, hyperspectral, FT-IR-based approach to screening for biocatalytic activity and metabolite overproduction. In: Kieslich, K, van der Beek, C P, de Bont, J A M and van den Tweel, W J J (eds) New Frontiers in Screening for Microbial Biocatalysts. Elsevier, 61-75.
Khodadadeh, S, Holstein, H, Purushothaman, S and Patrick, J 1998. A study of the effect of cyproheptadine on gait in hemiplegic children. Gait and Posture, 8, 205-213.
King, R D 1998. Application of machine learning to drug design. Nato ASI series.
King, R D 1998 Applications of machine learning in drug design. In: Codding, P W (ed) Structure-Based Drug Design: Experimental and Computational Approaches. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
King, R D 1998. Recent developments in applying machine learning in drug design.. In: P.W. Codding (ed.) Structure Based Drug Design: Experimental and Computational Approaches Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
King, R D, Sternberg, M J E, Muggleton, S H and Srinivasan, A 1998. Recent developments in applying machine learning to drug design. In: Codding, P W (ed) Structure Based Drug Design: Experimental and Computational Approaches. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
King, R D, Sternberg, M J E, Muggleton S H and Srinivasan, A 1998. Recent developments in Applying Machine Learning to Drug Design. Nato ASI series.
Lee, M H and Williams, T G 1998. Robot navigation using Fuzzy Spatial Inference. In: Proc. Int. Conf. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. IEEE, San Diego.
Long, F W and Seacord, R C 1998 (April 25-26). A comparison of component integration between JavaBeans and PCTE. In: Proc. Intl. Workshop on component-based software engineering.
McManus, A G 1998. Java: Memories are made of this. The Java Report, 3(11) 39-48.
McManus, A G and Hunt, J E 1998. Meeting the need for speed. The Java Report, 3(1) 55-60.
McManus, A G and Hunt, J E 1998. Optimising your Java programs. The Java Report, 3(5) 39-44.
Muggleton, S, Srinivasan, A, King, R D and Sternberg, M J E 1998. Biochemical knowledge discovery using inductive logic programming. Discovery Science 98.
Neal, M, Hunt, J E and Timmis, J 1998. Augmenting an artificial immune network. In: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. San Diego. IEEE.
Neal, M-T and Neal, M J 1998 (November). A software tool and techniques for converting map data into an Object Orientated representation. In: 6th ACM Symposium on GIS, Washington D.C. 63-68
O'Connor, J J, Zavatsky, A B, Lu, T-W, Leardini, A, Toutoungi, D, Huss, R and Holstein, H 1998 (August 2-8). Mathematical model of ligament kinematics and mechanics. Third World Congress of Biomechanics, Sapporo, Japan. Proceedings, Abstract p130.
Olivier, P (ed). 1998. Spatial language: cognitive and computational aspects. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Pitt-Francis, J and Featherstone, R 1998 (May). Automatic generation of sphere hierarchies from CAD data. In: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robotics and Automation, Leuven, Belgium. 324-329
Price, C J and Lee, M H 1998 (August). Qualitative reasoning for electrical design analysis. In: ECAI'98 workshop on Model-Based Systems and Qualitative Reasoning. 51-53
Price, C J and Taylor, N S 1998 (January). FMEA for multiple failures. In: Proc. Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. 43-47.
Ratcliffe, M B and Davies, T P 1998 (April). Aberystwyth's Remote Advisory Service as an effective tool for teaching. In: SEDA conference Implementing Learning Technologies: Strategies and Experience, Southampton.
Ratcliffe, M B and Davies, T P 1998. Providing a remote advisory service using videoconferencing. In: Implementation, Management and Provision of Videoconferencing, Nottingham. UKERNA.
Ratcliffe, M B and Davies, T P 1998 (June). Supporting distance education. In: 7th European distance education network conference. Universities in a Digital Era: Transformation, Innovation and Tradition 433-438.
Ratcliffe, M B and Davies, T P 1998. Using MBone technology to support a framework for a remote advisory service. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 21(1).
Srinivasan, A and King, R D 1998. Feature construction with inductive logic programming: a study of quantitative predictions of biological activity aided by structural attributes. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Journal.
Taylor, J, Goodacre, R, Wade, W G, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1998. The deconvolution of pyrolysis mass spectra using genetic programming: application to the identification of some Eubacterium species. FEMS Microbiology Letters, 160, 237-246.
Taylor, J, Rowland, J J, Gilbert, R J, Jones, A, Winson, M K and Kell, D B 1998 (May). Genetic algorithm decoding for the interpretation of Infra-red spectra in analytical biotechnology. In: Late breaking papers, EuroGP Conference, Paris.
Taylor, J, Rowland, J J, Goodacre, R, Gilbert, R J, Winson, M K and Kell, D B 1998. Genetic programming in the interpretation of Fourier transform infra-red spectra: Quantification of metabolites of pharmaceutical importance. In: Genetic Programming 1998: Proc. 3rd Annual Conf, Madison, WI. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA. 377-380.
Wiles, E and Bott, M F 1998. Eight Steps to your own economic model of software reuse. In: Proc. European Reuse Workshop '98. European Software Institute. 123-134.
Williams, T G and Hardy, N W 1998 (October). A behaviour-based architecture for force control of robot manipulators. In: IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, San Diego. 3532-3537.
Wilson, M S 1998. Evolution of behaviour sequences for real robots. In: Proc 7th European workshop on learning robots. 105-115
Winson, M K, Todd, M, Rudd, B A M, Jones, A, Alsberg, B K, Woodward, A M, Goodacre, R, Rowland, J J and Kell, D B 1998. DRASTIC (Diffuse Reflectance Absorbance Spectroscopy Taking In Chemometrics) approach for the rapid analysis of microbial fermentation products: quantification of aristeromycin and neplanocin A in Streptomyces citricolor broths. In: Kieslich, K, van der Beek, C P, de Bont, J A M and van den Tweel, W J J. New Frontiers in Screening for Microbial Biocatalysts. Elsevier. 185-191.
Bott, M F Member of the BCS Board of Examiners and Accreditation Panel. University of Wales representative on Boards of Study at British Hellenic College, Athens, and the Universitas Nebrissensis, Madrid.
Hunt, J E Member of the editorial advisory boards of Java Report Online and of Application Development Adviser.
Lee, M H Invited referee for the Public Good Science Fund of the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, New Zealand. Member of Engineering USP of University of Wales. Member of International Programme Committee of Second International Workshop on European Scientific and Industrial Collaboration to Promote Advanced Technologies in Manufacturing.
Long, F W Visiting Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Member of the Software Engineering Environments Conferences Steering Committee.
Tedd, M D Member, Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils (JISC), Advisory Committee on Networking (ACN), Committee for Electronic Information (CEI). Member of the Consumer Panel to advise the Director General of OFTEL on issues arising from the introduction of digital broadcasting and the convergence of the telecommunication and broadcasting industries. Chairman of the Welsh Advisory Committee on Telecommunications, of the ACN Monitoring Subcommittee, Vice Chairman of the Steering Group of the Llwybr/Pathway (Rural Wales Information Society) Project. Member of the Steering Committee of the Wales Information Society Project. Vice Chairman of the Governors of Penglais School.
MEMBERSHIP OF EDITORIAL BOARDS
Bott, M F BCS/Springer Practitioner Series.
Lee, M H Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, Elsevier, Journal of Systems Engineering, Springer.
Olivier, P L Joint editor with Stephen Hirtle (Pittsburgh), Spatial Cognition and Computation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Kluwer Academic Publishers. First issue due January, 1999.
Price, C J Book review editor of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
RESEARCH GRANTS AND CONTRACTS RECEIVED
Researchers: J J Rowland
Sponsors: BBSRCResearch Area: 'Teaching by Example' for Flexible Automation in Food Product Assembly
Financial support: £163,904
Researchers: P L Olivier
Sponsors: EPSRCResearch Area: Workshop on Thinking with Diagrams
Financial support: £3,000
Researchers: G M Coghill
Sponsors: EPSRCResearch Area: Model Switching in Diagnosis
Financial support: £52,738
Researchers: R D King
Sponsors: British-German Academic Research Collaboration ProgrammeResearch Area: Development of Intelligent Databases for Bioinformatics
Financial support: £3,900
Researchers: R D King, G M Coghill and D B Kell
Sponsors: BBSRCResearch Area: Bioinformatic System Identification
Financial support: £160,696
Researchers: J J Rowland
Sponsors: Industrial Research Ltd (NZ)Research Area: Advanced Manufacturing Systems and Technologies (Modular sensor based handling and processing)
Financial support: £6,600
Researchers: D E Price and A Vincentelli
Sponsors: UKERNAResearch Area: Piloting IP Videoconferencing
Financial support: £6,600
Researchers: M H Lee
Sponsors: CEC EspritResearch Area: MONET: The European Network of Excellence in Qualitative and Model-Based Reasoning
Financial support: £179,880
Researchers: D B Kell and J J Rowland
Sponsors: BBSRCResearch Area: Functional genomics via the metabolome
Financial support: £321,360
Researchers: S Muggleton and R D King
Sponsors: EPSRCResearch Area: Closed Loop Machine Learning
Financial support: Travel expenses
Researchers: L Tomos and D E Price
Sponsors: Antur TeifiResearch Area: The Telematics strand of LEADER II for Ceredigion
Financial support: £10,000
In addition, the following research work funded by outside institutions continued during 1998:
Researchers: H Holstein
Sponsors: Joy Welch Educational TrustResearch Area: Diabetes research
Financial support: £4,500
Researchers: D B Kell and J J Rowland
Sponsors: BBSRC and GlaxoResearch Area: An FT-IR Based Metabolic Microscope for Biotechnology
Financial support: £406,865
Researchers: C J Price and M B Ratcliffe
Sponsors: EPSRC and Kaye PresteigneResearch Area: QPAC: Intelligent Reuse of Process FMEA Information
Financial support: £167,854
Researchers: J J Rowland and D B Kell
Sponsors: BBSRCResearch Area: Rapid Analysis of Multiple Determinands Using Ultrasensitive Dispersive Raman Spectroscopy and Supervised Learning
Financial support: £474,536
Researchers: J E Hunt
Sponsors: EPSRCResearch Area: Machine Learning Mechanisms Based on the Immune System
Financial support: £124,681
Researchers: C J Price and M S Wilson
Sponsors: EPSRC and Jaguar Cars LtdResearch Area: Aquavit: Advancing Qualitative Analysis for Verification, Interaction, Analysis and Testing
Financial support: £215,703
Researchers: E D Sherratt
Sponsors: CEC ActsResearch Area: SCREEN
Financial support: £375,610
Researchers: M B Ratcliffe and M D Tedd
Sponsors: JISC Technology Applications ProgrammeResearch Area: NEAT: Networked Expertise, Advice and Tuition
Financial support: £164,738
Researchers: J J Rowland and D B Kell
Sponsors: HEFCWResearch Area: Intelligent Systems in Complex Biological and Biotechnological Analysis - An Industrial Support Facility
Financial support: £96,000
Researchers: C J Price and P L Olivier
Sponsors: EPSRCResearch Area: GENMECH: Investigating Automation of Mechanical FMEA
Financial support: £105,994
Researchers: M D Tedd and D E Price
Sponsors: Llwybr/PathwayResearch Area: Llwybr/Pathway Technical Support Centre
Financial support: £111,815
Researchers: D B Kell and J J Rowland
Sponsors: EPSRCResearch Area: Explanatory Analysis of Complex Vibrational Spectra using Genetic Programming of Fuzzy Rules
Financial support: £94,159
Researchers: R D King
Sponsors: EPSRCResearch Area: Deep Database Mining
Financial support: £53,117
Researchers: R D King
Sponsors: BBSRCResearch Area: Improved Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Using Advanced Statistics and Machine Learning
Financial support: £140,968
Researchers: D B Kell, G W Griffith and J J Rowland
Sponsors: BBSRCResearch Area: The Development of Histometrics
Financial support: £90,544
LECTURES AND ADDRESSES TO LEARNED SOCIETIES AND CONFERENCES
Hunt, J E and Long, F W. Building High Integrity Systems in Java. Object Technology '98, Oxford, April, 1998
Loftus, C W. An overview of SCREEN. Object Management Group meeting, Manchester, 30 March 1998.
Lawrence, D R, Sloane A, Price, D E, Constable, G. Live Internet Broadcasting - some unique experiences. Digital Convergence: The Future of the Internet & World Wide Web, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, UK.
Wiles, E and Bott, M F. Eight steps to your own economic model of software reuse. In "European Reuse Workshop '98: Position Papers and Presentations", pages 123-127, Bilbao, Spain, November 1998. European Software Institute.
Four members of the department presented papers at the University of Wales Mechatronics Colloquium for staff and research students at Gregynog 16/17 May 98, namely: N W Hardy, Virtual Sensing; M H Lee, Adaptive Robotics; M J Neal, Neural Networks in VLSI; T G Williams, Behavioural Force Control; M H Lee, Tactile Sensing.
POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS AND STUDENTSHIPS
An EPSRC Research Studentship was awarded to Lutfun Nahar.
An MRC Studentship was awarded to Jennifer Randles.
PhD
Garrett, Simon. A Schema-based, Unsupervised Learning Approach to Controlling a System of unknown functionality.
Mustapha, Syed. Qualitative Reasoning in the Automated Categorization of Linear Visco Elastic Models.
King, Jon. An Objective Measurement of Audio Quality in Tele-communication Networks.
MPhil
Arnold, David. Towards the Resolution of Student Programming Problems using Case-based reasoning.
MSc
The Degree of MSc in Computer Science was awarded to 29 candidates.
The Degree of MSc in Software Engineering was awarded to one candidate.
McCardle, J R Organiser (for MONET), Workshop on Model-Based Systems and Qualitative Reasoning, held in conjunction with the 13th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI'98, 1998, Brighton, UK.
Olivier, P L Member, programme committee, and local organiser, Thinking with Diagrams '98, Aberystwyth, UK, 1998 (financial support from EPSRC: £3,000). Organising committee member of the 2nd Workshop on Conceptual Descriptions from Images, International Conference on Computer Vision, Bombay, India, 1998. Member, programme committee, Mind III: the annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society of Ireland, Dublin, Republic of Ireland, 1998. Member, organising committee, Combining AI and Graphics for the Interface of the Future, held in conjunction with the 13th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI'98, 1998, Brighton, UK. Member, organising committee, Formalizing Reasoning with Visual and Diagrammatic Representations, AAAI 1998 Fall Symposium, Orlando, Florida.