Overview

Director: Professor Emma Hart

The drive behind the Centre for Emergent Computing is the desire to solve real problems that people care about. Many industrial and commercial problems do not have perfect solutions that can be found in a reasonable time - we need methods that find acceptable solutions in the time available. Solutions are also required that are robust and which can evolve with changing circumstances. Many biological and social systems are very good at doing exactly this, and they can give us insight and inspiration into new methods of problem solving. Emergent Computing studies and uses biologically and socially inspired systems in which complex behaviour at the global level emerges from the interaction of large numbers of simple components.

Artificial Immune Systems, Combinatorial Optimisation, Evolutionary Computing, Pervasive Adaptation

	Current and Recent Projects A software tool for optimising business travel. To produce a commercially viable tool that identifies opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of business travel activities. A range of techniques will be used to search for such opportunities and assess them according to user preferences. DREAM This project seeks to provide the technology and software infrastructure necessary to support the next generation of evolving infohabitants in a way that makes that infrastructure universal, open and scalable. New Ties The project is concerned with emergence and complexity in socially-inspired artificial systems. We will study large systems consisting of an environment and an inhabitant population. PANORAMA The goal of the PANORAMA coordination action is to bring together the wide range of researchers in the field covered by the PERADA proactive initiative, and to build a new community of researchers who can work together on common goals, so ensuring that the research carried out by members of that com Speckled Computing To establish a research infrastructure for realising minute (around 1 cubic millimetre) semiconductor specks which can sense, compute and communicate wirelessly. Specks, scattered or sprayed on the person or surfaces, will collaborate as programmable computational networks called specknets. Vehicle Routing with Agent Technologies Currently a large number of problem solving techniques for vehicle routing are available. It is not always obvious why some techniques are better suited to some problems.