PhD Projects

Adaptation to unexpected situations

Cesar A Marin is creating an adaptive multi-agent system capable to self-adapt its structure and internal organisation in order to make distributed applications adaptable to unexpected situations. In nature, ecological systems have capabilities that allow them to adapt themselves to continuous and unexpected changes occuring in their complex and dynamic environment. Therefore, Cesar is drawing adaptation features seen in ecological systems and applying them in multi-agent systems, so that they can deal with unexpected changes.

Rationale-based requirements negotiation

Yishu Ding is working in the area of requirements engineering. She is interested in looking for efficient methods and technologies to tackle conflicts among stakeholders' elicited requirements. Her research topic is "rationale-based requirements negotiation", as she intends to approach human related conflicts from the perspective of the rationale. The proposed methodology is comprised of three main steps: correlation analysis, system dynamics-based analysis, and strategy scenario analysis.

Mitigating operational risk in information systems

Danny Dresner from The National Computing Centre (NCC) is working part-time (over six years) with Professor Bob Wood on a risk mitigation framework in the belief that standards mitigate risk and can be made more accessible by relating them to risk and the causes of risk.

Business faces many risks which must be managed or mitigated to avoid undesirable outcomes. The lessons learnt by the distillation of best practice and proven tools and techniques encapsulated in standards can support businesses in mitigating these risks. (Only 10% of organisations have a formal and well-integrated IS/IT risk management framework.) The ubiquitous and pervasive nature of information systems in business suggests that businesses would be well advised to apply standards to mitigate at least the known risks and create the feedback to reduce the residual footprint of the unknown or unknowable risks.

So far, the work has led to a chapter in a legal text book on technology and communications risk, a handbook on information security management, and a computer security MSc module for the School of Computing Science.