Southampton professor listed as one of the world’s top researchers
Professor Nick Jennings of the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has been listed as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers.
The listing, which appears today (Friday 22 October) on ISIHighlyCited.com has identified Professor Jennings as one of the most highly-cited researchers of our time in both engineering and computer science and as someone who has contributed to the progress of science through his insight and accomplishments. He is one of only 20 academics worldwide to be listed in both categories.
Professor Jennings becomes the eigth University of Southampton professor listed on the website. The others are Philip Calder (Medicine), Sheng Chen (ECS), Stephen Holgate (Medicine), Michael Hursthouse (Chemistry), Martin Palmer (Ocean and Earth Sciences), David Payne (Optoelectronics Research Centre) and Hugh Perry (Biological Sciences).
Professor Jennings, who was recently appointed as a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, says: “I am delighted to be joining this prestigious group of academics who have all had a major impact on the scientific landscape through the take-up of the ideas and solutions they have presented in their published work.”
Professor Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of agent-based computing, such as automated trading systems in the world’s banks and stock exchanges, and intelligent systems, where the components of the system can learn from each other and can adapt their behaviour.
His research covers both the theory and the application of such systems. Specifically, he has undertaken fundamental research on automated bargaining and auctions (as on e-Bay), markets, mechanism design, trust and reputation, coalition formation and decentralised control.
He has also pioneered the application of multi-agent technology; developing some of the first real-world systems (in areas such as business process management, energy systems, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, and eDefence) and generally advocating the area of agent-oriented software engineering.
He has just completed the ALADDIN programme, a five-year strategic research programme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and BAE Systems, which developed a multi-agent toolbox across a range of data and information applications for emergency scenarios. This research will be further developed in the new ORCHID programme. Also funded by the EPSRC, with significant investment from industrial partners, ORCHID will tackle the challenge of understanding, designing, building, and deploying systems that are composed of human-agent collectives (HACs), where instead of issuing instructions to passive machines, people work in partnership with highly inter-connected computational components (agents) that are able to act autonomously and intelligently.
Notes for editors
- Professor Jennings joined ECS in 1999 and has become one of the country’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, attracting over £13 million of grant income for his work in this field.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. More recently, he was appointed as a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government.
For further information about Professor Nick Jennings, visit: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/nrj and http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/
- With over 38,000 citations in Google Scholar, Nick Jennings is the third most highly-cited researcher in the area of artificial intelligence (according to Microsoft's Libra system) and has an h-index of 82 (the second top non-American according to Palsberg).
- ISIHighlyCited.com, developed by Thomson Reuters, is the first online community composed of and designed completely for highly-cited scientific researchers. It highlights the top 250 pre-eminent individual researchers in each of 21 subject categories, who have demonstrated great influence in their field as measured by citations to their work for the period 1981-2008.