I do research in the general areas of nature-inspired and social/economics-inspired computation. For the uninitiated, this is about trying to take ideas from interesting natural and social systems and using them to build novel computing systems. In particular, these areas tend to be useful as sources of inspiration, since they themselves have lots of nice properties, such as scalability, robustness, decentralisation etc. The idea is to be able to replicate such properties in computing.
My real focus right now is about developing algorithms to support self-awareness and self-expression in computing systems, and this is the goal of the European project, EPiCS, on which I work. Particularly, I'm interested in developing and analysing intelligent online algorithms, such as those using evolutionary computation and other nature-inspired techniques, for use in self-aware agents. I'm then interested in the interaction between such online algorithms, which is studied in the field of multi-agent systems. Common ways of reasoning about the interactions are co-evolution and game theory.
My Ph.D. looked more specifically at how ideas from economics might be used in order to develop approaches to allocate resources in decentralised computational systems. I studied the retail-inspired posted offer market mechanism in this context, which avoids much of the complexity of other approaches often taken in market-based resource allocation.
More generally, I am interested in the interplay between Computer Science and the Social Sciences and natural world. This means I have a broad interest in natural computation, multi-agent systems, agent-based modelling of complex systems, the development and analysis of game-playing strategies, reputation mechanisms, algorithmic trading and the development of marketing strategies. Moreover, I'm interested in how these things might be applied in practical scenarios to achieve specific outcomes.
I don't write much technical stuff on this site (this page is about it), but you can read more on my academic web site, at prlewis.com.
