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Research Interests

I am a member of the Cognitive Science research group, leading the Naturally Inspired Computing stream. Specific research interests includde: Artificial Intelligence, Evolutionary Algorithms and Genetic Repair, Cognitive Modelling, Analogical reasoning, Geometric Analogies, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning and Computational Creativity.

Evolutionary Algorithms with Non-Mendelian Genetic Repair

Recent discoveries in genetics suggest that some organisms (eg Arabidopsis thaliana and possibly some other plants) use a surprising and controversial mechanism to repair some genetic defects. They appear to use a limited form of non-Mendelian inheritance, whereby the corrective genetic information appears to originate in generations older than the parent. We are successfully applying this ancestral repair "algorithm" to solve evolutionary optimisation problems with two distinct objectives in mind. First, we wish to evaluate the usefulness of the proposed ancestral repair theory to evolutionary optimisation problems. Secondly, we are interested in the conditions under which the proposed genetic repair process might be an effective strategy in nautre. I am also interested in the deep analogy between natural and simulated evolution.

Previous Project - Analogical Inference within Topographic Map data.

We developed algorithms to process land-cover maps as though they are large collections of overlapping geometric analogies. A geometric analogy involves collections of geometric figures which undergo some transformation. See my analogy, and the like page or some other analogy reference pages.

Publications Some Recent Publications

Research Team I am a member of the Cognitive Science Research Group research group.

My current Postgraduate students: Amy Fitzgerald (PhD), Donagh Hatton (PhD), Paul Kavanagh (MSc).
My Undergraduate Project Students (2011-12) Mustapha Ahmed, Dave Kerr, Onisim Csadi.

Conferences 3^rd International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012.

Competitions IBM’s Open Source competition for final year projects, IEEExtreme 24 hour challenge.

Background I am a lecturer in computer science and a member of: the Cognitive Science Research Group, ACM's SIGEVO, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Internet Society and I'm an associate of the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG). Here is some other personal stuff.

Teaching

Undergraduate courses I teach or have taught :

CS101 Introduction to Programming, CS130 Databases, CS142 Introduction to Computer Science, CS404 Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, CS401 - Machine Learning and Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Expert Systems, End User computing, Introduction to Computer Systems, Digital Logic Design.

MSc in Computer Science(Software Engineering) - M. Sc. (Software Engineering) courses I teach :

CS607 Requirements Engineering and Systems Design with UML.

Order from Chaos game.

Course Director As of 1st Feb 2011 I handed over course director duties for the Master of Computer Science (Software Engineering and the Post Graduate Diploma in Science (Software Engineering) programs to Dr. Rosemary Monahan. I have taken up the challenge of teaching a few hundred 1st year students.