ECS research fellow to be honoured for excellence in computer science

A research fellow at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science will be honoured next week for his PhD on computerised agent systems.

Dr Rajdeep Dash has been selected by the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with the British Computer Society (BCS), as the winner of the Distinguished Dissertation Competition 2007. He will receive his award at the 2007 BCS Roger Needham Lecture at the Royal Society in London on Tuesday 13 November.

Although this competition has existed since 1990, this is the first time that a Southampton researcher has won the first prize.

Dr Dash's dissertation, entitled Distributed Mechanisms for Multi-Agent Systems: Analysis and Design, uses techniques from game theory to design markets that allocate resources (such as energy and bandwidth) and control the flow of information in sensor networks.
"There is an increasing need for computer systems that operate a decentralised control regime, and that contain a number of components representing distinct, agile stakeholders with different aims and objectives," said Dr Dash.

"Within the systems I have developed, I have designed new auction protocols which could change the way auctions are used to manage supply chains by incorporating more information such as trustworthiness, capacity and information elucidated from competitors."

Dr Dash's PhD thesis was supervised by Professor Nick Jennings, Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group in ECS, who said: "This thesis is an excellent example of what a PhD should look like. It has made foundational scientific contributions and shown how these can be used in practice for an important class of real-world problems.

"The technical contribution lies at the intersection of economics (game theory) and computer science, which is one of the most exciting areas of research for the next generation of decentralized information."

The annual dissertation award selects the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science. Over 20 submissions were received covering a wide range of research topics and after a rigorous review process involving international experts, the judging panel selected three dissertations that were regarded as exemplary, from which the winner was chosen.

Professor Roger Hubbold, Chair, CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertations Competition, said of this year's competition: "The high standard of the dissertations is a testament to the excellence of computer science research in the UK - long may it continue!"