During the year, the University of Wales conferred the title of Honorary
Professor on Martyn Thomas, previously an honorary fellow in the department.
Professor Thomas is chairman of Praxis plc and a partner in Touche Ross,
its owner. He is well known for his concern for the safety of software-based
systems and we were delighted that he agreed to give what was, to all intents
and purposes, an inaugural lecture on the subject, which was attended and
enjoyed by an audience of over 300.
Fred Long spent seven weeks during the summer at Carnegie-Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, at the invitation of the Software Engineering Institute. The
Institute has now appointed him a Visiting Scientist, the first European
to be so honoured. Chris Price gave a series of three invited lectures
at Michigan State University.
The department was able to make two new appointments to lectureships
during the year and we were pleased to welcome Keiichi Nakata and to welcome
back John Hunt. We were also delighted to be able to congratulate Chris
Price on his promotion to a Senior Lectureship.
During the course of his job leave, spent as manager of automation technology
at Industrial Research Ltd, a New Zealand Government agency in Auckland,
Howard Nicholls decided that his future, at least for the next few years,
lay in New Zealand. While we were sorry to lose him, his move has led to
a fruitful and still developing cooperation between the department and
Industrial Research
It is unfortunate, albeit probably inevitable, that the year's work
in teaching should seem, in retrospect, to have been dominated by the teaching
quality assessment. The panel's report was very complimentary, even though
they felt unable to award us the coveted `excellent' accolade; it was comforting
that they were moved to congratulate us on some things of which we are
proud and we have to admit that they were right in identifying others as
capable of improvement.
Our regular success in the Welsh Development Agency's competition for
the best final year projects continued in 1994; we congratulate Neil Taylor
on being awarded one of the six prizes - as well as a first class degree.
Firsts were also awarded to Andy Burnett, Nigel Hughes and Hugh Macmillan.
Industrial collaboration has long been a feature of the department's
research but the past year has seen the start of two important industrial
collaborations on the teaching front.
Siôn Wyn, a director of FJ Systems Ltd, has been teaching two days a week in the department thoughout the first semester of the 1994/95 session, an arrangement which has proved very successful and which we hope will continue in future years. FJ Systems is a successful company founded some ten years ago by two graduates from the department; it specialises in software for the pharmaceutical industry and currently employs some 35 staff, about a third of whom are Aberystwyth graduates.
K2 is a company that specialises in the development of software tools;
it, too, is run by a graduate of the department, Peter Parsonage. K2 have
generously sponsored the weekends for first year students devoted to team
building and the development of interpersonal skills; their sponsorship
has not been limited to money but, even more valuably, staff from the company
have participated in the weekends, adding immeasurably to the benefit that
the students gain from them.
The department was successful in 1993 in bidding for funds from the
Research Quality Initiative established by the Welsh Higher Education Funding
Council. This success was repeated in 1994, when the original funding was
confirmed for a further two years and additional funding was awarded. The
net effect is that the initiative is supporting one third of a professor,
two lecturers, a research fellow, a computer officer, three research students,
and a part-time secretary, for the 1994/95 and 1995/96 sessions. This funding
is allowing us to maintain the level of research activity in the department
despite the pressures of substantially increased student numbers.
It is in the nature of Computer Science that a significant part of our research consists in applying the results of our work to other disciplines. As the list of publications shows, the department's research work is applied in fields as far apart as plant photosynthesis and automotive engineering, biosensing and telecommunications. Particularly pleasing in this context is the award of a substantial grant by the BBSRC jointly to Doug Kell of the Institute of Biological Science and Jem Rowland.
There is a cyclical element in the pattern of research contracts awarded
to the department, induced partly by the phasing of the calls for proposals
from the European Commission and partly by the need to come close to completing
one grant before applying for the next. The award of some £275,000
in research grants in an `off' year is, therefore, an unexpected success.
The list of publications and conference papers bears witness to the continuing vigour of the department's research activities. Especially noteworthy was the fact that John Hunt's paper, Case-based construction of functional models was selected for the best technical paper award at the 1994 conference of the British Computer Society's Expert System Specialist Group, in Cambridge, and we congratulate him.
Members of the department have acted as external examiners for higher
degrees in Heriot Watt University and in the universities of Birmingham,
Huddersfield, Manchester and York.
Gautier, R.J., Loftus, C.W., Thomas, L., and Jowett, J.A.
`Tcl Interface to Emeraude PCTE.' In Lindquist, T. and Koehnemann,
H. (eds).
Proc. PCTE '94 Conference, pp284-301. PIMB Association,
San Francisco, 1994..
Hardy, N.W. and Lee, M.H. `The effect of the product cost
factor on error handling in industrial robotics.' Proc. AAAI Spring
Symposium on Detecting and Resolving Errors in Manufacturing Systems,
Stanford, USA, pp59 - 64. 1994.
Hunt, J.E. and Cooke, D.E. `Qualitatively modelling photosynthesis.'
Applied Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 8, No 3, pp 307-332, (1994).
Hunt, J.E., Lee, M.H. and Price, C.J. `Applications of
qualitative model-based reasoning.' Control Engineering Practice,
Vol 1, No 2, pp 253 - 266.
Hunt, J.E. and Miles, R.G. `Hybrid Case-Based Reasoning.'
Knowledge
Engineering Review, Vol 9, No. 4. 1994.
Hunt, J.E., Pugh, D.R. and Price, C.J. `Failure mode effects
analysis: A practical application of functional modelling.' Applied
Artificial Intelligence. Vol 9, pp33 - 44. 1994.
Hunt, J.E., Cooke, D.E. and Matthews, B. `Qualitatively
Reasoning about Plant Biological Processes.' IMACS Symposium on Mathematical
Modelling. February, 1994.
Joseph, R.M., Rowland, J.J. and Nicholls, H.R. Proc
IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, San
Antonio, Texas, USA. pp700 - 705. October, 1994.
King, C. M. and Pyle, I. C. `Reporting quality of service
and functionality requests from operating systems.' In Poley, R., Hillston,
J. and King, P. (eds). 10th UK Performance Engineering Workshop,
pp79 - 87. UKPEW, 1994.
King, C.M. and Rixon, A.J. `Automating symbolic link generation.'
Systems Administration, Vol 3, No 5, pp 43 - 47, 1994.
King, C.M. `A distributed file location and properties checker.'
Systems
Administration, Vol 3, No 2, pp 32 - 48, 1994.
Lee, M.H. and Ormsby, A.R.T. `Qualitatively modelling
the effects of electrical circuit faults.' Artificial Intelligence in
Engineering, Vol 8, No 4, pp 293 - 300.
Lee M.H., Ormsby A.R.T., Nakata K. and Olivier P. L. `Enhanced product integrity through functional reasoning support tools.' Proc. 27th International Symposium on Automotive Technology and Automation. Aachen, 1994, pp413 - 422.
Lee, M.H., Li, Y.F., Rowland, J.J. and Rodrigues, M.A. `Structured
supervisory control and grasp determination for product packing by robot.'
Proc Factory 2000: 4th IEE International Conference on Advanced Factory
Automation. York, October, 1994, pp 496-501.
Li, Y.F., Lee, M.H., Rodrigues, M.A. and Rowland, J.J.
`A visually-guided robot system for food handling applications.' Proc.
IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation. San Diego,
May 1994, pp 2591 - 2597.
Li, Y.F., Lee, M.H., Rodrigues, M.A. and Rowland, J.J.
`Supervisory Robotic Control under Vision Guidance.' Proc. IEEE International
Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Munich, Germany, September,
1994, pp 2030 - 2035.
Leung, C-C. and Long, F.W. `Representing Ada program constructs
in PCTE.' In Lindquist, T. and Koehnemann, H. (eds). Proc. PCTE '94
Conference, pp262 - 283. PIMB Association, San Francisco, 1994.
Li, Y.F. `A Proximity Sensor and Its Application in Real Time
Robot Control. International Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems,
Vol. 13, pp25 - 37. 1994.
Li, Y.F. `Characteristics and signal processing of a proximity
sensor.' Robotica, Vol. 12, Part 4, pp335 - 341, 1994.
Li, Y.F. `On the use of velocity feedback for robot impact control.'
International
Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol. 13, pp 297 - 305,
1994.
Loftus, C.W. (ed) Ada Yearbook 1994. IOS Press, Amsterdam,
1994, pp450.
Olivier, P. and Tsujii, J. `A quantitative perceptual
model of the semantics of spatial prepositions.' AI Review, Vol
8, No 1, 1994. pp. 147-158.
Olivier, P. and Tsujii, J. `A computational view of the
cognitive semantics of spatial prepositions.' Proc 32nd Annual Meeting
of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 303 - 309. Las
Cruces, New Mexico, USA, 1994.
Olivier, P., Maeda, T. and Tsujii, J. `Automatic depiction
of spatial descriptions.' Proc 12th National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI-94), pp 1405 - 1410. Seattle, Washington, USA, 1994.
Pegler, S. and Price, C.J. `CASPIAN: the advantages of rewriting
history.' Proc World Congress on Expert Systems. Lisbon, January
1994.
Price, C.J. and Pegler, I.S. `Case-based reasoning for system parameterization,' Information Technology Awareness in Engineering, pp 65 - 74,published DRAL, ISBN 0902-376-152,
Pugh, D.R. Review of: Schreiber, G., Wielinga, B. and
Breuker, J. (eds). KADS: A Principled Approach to Knowledge-Based System
Development. Academic Press. Reviewed in International Journal of
Applied Expert systems, Vol 2, No 1, pp72 - 75
Pugh, D.R., Hunt, J.E. and Price, C.J.. `Distributed knowledge
acquisition.' Proc. World Congress on Expert Systems. Lisbon, January,
1994.
Pugh, D.R., Hunt, J.E. and Price, C.J. `Augmenting Raphael
with behaviour charts.' Proc AAAI-94, Workshop on Functional Reasoning
and Functional Representation, pp132 - 142, 1994.
Rodrigues M.A. `Experiments on interaction and control in a dynamic
market environment.' In Proc 13th IASTED International Conference on
Modelling, Identification and Control. Grindenwald, Switzerland. February,
1994.
Rodrigues M.A. `A Pop-11 visual programming environment for modelling
dynamic systems behaviour.' In Graham, I.M. (ed). Applications and Innovations
in Expert Systems. Information Press Ltd., Oxford, pp. 309 - 317.
Rodrigues, M.A. `A simulation construction kit for modelling
dynamic systems.' Proc European Simulation Symposium (ESS-93), Delft,
The Netherlands, October, 1993, pp 3 - 5.
Rodrigues, M.A. and Lee, M.H. (eds) Perceptual Control Theory.
University of Wales, 1994.
Rodrigues, M.A. and Lee, M.H. `Hierarchical control of transition
and configuration.' In Rodrigues, M.A. and Lee, M.H. (eds) Perceptual
Control Theory, pp 51 - 60.
Rodrigues, M.A. and Li, Y.F. `Learning to grasp generic shapes.'
In Rodrigues, M.A. and Lee, M.H. (eds) Perceptual Control Theory,
pp 61 - 70.
Rodrigues, M.A. and Li, Y.F. `Qualitative knowledge and control
of sensory input in robotic handling tasks.' Proc Third International
Workshop on Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence. San Sebastian,
Spain. December, 1994, pp183--185.
Rodrigues, M.A., Li, Y.F., Loftus, C. and Ratcliffe, M.B.
`Systems modelling and software development in a visual programming environment.'
Proc 16th International Conference on Software Engineering. Sorrento,
Italy. May, 1994.
Rodrigues, M.A., Loftus, C.W., Li, Y.F. and Ratcliffe, M.B.
`Structure notation of dynamic systems: a pictorial language approach.'
ACM SIGPLAN Notices, April 1994, pp4.
Rodrigues, M.A., Loftus, C., Ratcliffe, M. and Li, Y.F.
`Structure notation of dynamic systems: a pictorial language approach.'
In
Proc IEEE Computer Society International Conference on Computer Languages,
pp219 - 228. Toulouse, France. May , 1994
Whittle, B.R., Gautier, R.J. and Ratcliffe, M.B. `Trends
In Structure Oriented Environments.' International Journal of Software
Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, 1994.
Whittle, B.R., Gautier, R.J. and Ratcliffe, M.B. `Trends
In Structure Oriented Environments.' In Hurley, D. Software Engineering
and Knowledge Engineering: Trends for the Next Decade. Volume 4 in
the series
Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, World
Scientific, 1994
Bott, M.F. Professional Board, Accreditation Panel and Board
of Examiners of the British Computer Society. Specialist Assessor to the
Teaching Quality Assessment Panels for the Higher Education Funding Councils
of England and Wales. Reviewer of advanced courses for the IT Committee
of EPSRC. University of Wales representative on Boards of Study at Gwent
College of Higher Education, and the Universitas Nebrissensis, Madrid.
Director of Ada Language UK Limited.
Lee, M.H. International Scientific Advisory Committee for Applications
of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering. Referee for the Public Good
Science Fund of the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, New
Zealand. Invited expert for SERC-CDP and MRC-JCI project review panels.
Reviewer of advanced courses for CDP and IT Committees of EPSRC. Member
of the EPSRC peer review college for Computing. Reviewer for EPSRC Advanced
Fellowships. Referee for AID'94. Member of Programme Committee for the
"Lean Manufacturing in the Automotive Industries" conference at the 27th
International Symposium on Automotive Technology and Automation, Aachen,
October 1994.
Price, D.E. Invited expert contributor to the European Commission's
ORA dissemination activity.
Ratcliffe, M.B. Board of Examiners of the British Computer Society.
Rowland, J.J. Invited expert on ACME project final review panels.
Tedd, M.D. SERC/DTI Systems Engineering Committee. Joint Information
Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils(JISC). Advisory
Committee on Networking (ACN). Follett Implementation Group for IT (FIGIT).
Business Strategy Forum of DISC, the British Standards Institute's IT standards
organisation. Chairman of the Welsh Advisory Committee on Telecommunications,
of the ACN Monitoring Subcommittee, and of the JISC Standards Working Group.
Parent governor of Penglais School
Membership of Editorial Boards
Bott, M.F. Ada Year Book (Chairman). BCS/Prentice Hall Practitioner
Series.
Lee, M.H. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, Journal of
Systems Engineering.
Tedd, M.D. PCTE News.
Research Grants and Contracts
Received
Researchers: R. J. Gautier
Sponsors: European CommissionResearch Area: Systems engineering for network debugging
Financial Support: £164,800
Researchers: C. J. Price
Sponsors: Welsh OfficeResearch Area: Increased profitability through knowledge-based systems for SMEs in North and Mid Wales
Financial Support: £12,450
Researchers: D. B. Kell (Biological Sciences) and J. J. RowlandSponsors: BBSRCResearch Area: Quantification of microbial productivity via multi-angle light scattering and supervised learning
Financial Support: £159,772
Researchers: M. H. LeeSponsors: European CommissionResearch Area: Cooperation scheme with China - visit of Dr Wu Chengdong
Financial Support: £4,727
Researchers: M. H. Lee and M. A RodriguesSponsors: UWA Research FundResearch Area: First European Workshop on Perceptual Control Theory
Financial Support: £2,000
Researchers: J. R. HuntSponsors: UWA Research FundResearch Area: Exploiting DNA in messy genetic algorithms
Financial Support: £5,992
Researchers: P. OlivierSponsors: UWA Research FundResearch Area: Robot control using natural language
Financial Support: £1,000
Lectures and Addresses to Learned Societies and
Conferences
Lush, A., Rowland, J.J. and Wilson, M.S. `Characteristics of
Robot Behaviours.' International Workshop on Advanced Robotics and Intelligent
Machines, IEE, Salford, March 1994.
Hunt, J.E. `Case-Based Construction of Functional Models.' Presented
at the 1994 conference of the British Computer Society Expert System Group.
Jones, A., Kell, D.B., Rowland, J.J., Woodward, A.M. and Zhang, X.
`Whole Cell Biosensors based on Nonlinear Dielectric Spectroscopy.' Presented
at the Dielectrics Society Conference, Canterbury, March, 1994.
Kell, D.B., Davey, C.L., Jones, A., Rowland, J.J., Todd, R.W., Woodward,
A.M. and Zhang, X. `Nonfaradaic biosensing in intact cellular systems.'
Presented at the Dielectrics Society Conference, Canterbury, March, 1994.
Khodadadeh, S., Cooke, J.R. and Holstein, H. `Ascending and descending
a step by Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients.' Presented at the International
Symposium on Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering,
Swansea, September 1994.
Olivier, P. `Where is "in front"?' German Centre for Artificial
Intelligence, Saarbrücken, December 1994.
Price, D.E. `LAN access and interconnection via ISDN.' European
ISDN Forum, April 1994. Adopted as an official position paper.
Price, D.E. `ISDN in rural area.' European ISDN Forum,
April 1994. Adopted as an official position paper.
Price, D.E. `Experience and results of the BIRD project.' EC
Telematics Research in the 4th Framework Programme. Workshop in Llandrindod
Wells organised by the DTI and the Welsh Relay Centre. November, 1994.
Price, D.E. `ISDN research at Aberystwyth in an EC context.'
TERENA Workshop, London, December, 1994.
Rodrigues, M.A., Li, Y.F., Loftus, C. and Ratcliffe M. `Systems
Modelling and Software Development in a Visual Programming Environment.'
Presented at a workshop on the intersection between Software Engineering
and Artificial Intelligence, as part of the 16th International Conference
on Software Engineering, Sorrento, Italy, May, 1994.
Rodrigues, M.A. `Visual programming and cognitive modelling.'
Presented at the Fifth JCI Summer School in Cognitive Science and HCI,
Edinburgh, September, 1993.
Postgraduate Scholarships and Studentships
EPSRC Research Studentships were awarded to T. G. Williams and N. Hughes.
A College Research Studentship was awarded to: J. King.
A Research Studentship in the Centre for Intelligent Systems was awarded
to: N. Lacey.
Higher Degrees Awarded
Ph.D.
Forrester J. M. The Precision Required of Digital Neural Hardware
Neal M. J. Investigation into Combined Conventional and Neural Processing
Price C. J. Model Reuse in Diverse Problem Solvers
M.Phil.
Warren P. F. The Control and Management of Processes in Tool
Support Interfaces
The degree of M.Sc. in Computer Science was awarded to 32 candidates.
First European Workshop on Perceptual Control Theory, at Gregynog,
University of Wales, 23 to 27 June 1994. Organisers: M. H. Lee and M. A.
Rodrigues.