Abstract:
As computation increasingly pervades the world around us, it will profoundly change the ways in which we work with computers. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines, humans and software agents will continually and flexibly establish a range of collaborative relationships with one another, forming human-agent collectives (HACs) to meet their individual and collective goals. This vision of people and computational agents operating at a global scale offers tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help us meet the key societal challenges of sustainability, inclusion, and safety that are core to our future. To fully realise this vision, we require a principled science that allows us to reason about the computational and human aspects of these systems. In this talk, I will explore the science that is needed to understand, build and apply HACs that symbiotically interleave human and computer systems to an unprecedented degree. Drawing on multi-disciplinary work in the areas of artificial intelligence, agent-based computing, machine learning, decentralised information systems, crowd sourcing, participatory systems, and ubiquitous computing, the talk will explore the science of HACs to real-world applications in the critical domains of the smart grid, disaster response and citizen science.
Biography:
Professor Jennings is a Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government in the area of National Security and the inaugural Regius Professor of Computer Science in Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University. He is an internationally-recognized authority in the areas of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and agent-based computing. His research covers both the science and the engineering of such systems. He has undertaken fundamental research on automated bargaining, mechanism design, trust and reputation, coalition formation, human-agent collectives and crowd sourcing. He has also pioneered the application of multi-agent technology; developing real-world systems in domains such as business process management, smart energy systems, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, citizen science and defence.
He has published over 500 articles and graduated 40 PhD students. With 59,000 citations and an h-index of 104, he is one of the world’s most highly cited computer scientists. He has received a number of international awards for his research: the Computers and Thought Award (the premier award for a young AI scientist and the first European-based recipient in the Award’s 30 year history), the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award and an IEE Achievement Medal. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).