Adaptive Systems

The Intelligent Adaptive Systems Research Group is researching techniques capable of handling real
world problems with a significant degree of uncertainty associated with them. More particularly we
are interested in a class of problems known as Human Centered Intelligent Systems. The application
areas that we have developed expertise in are Communication Management (Intelligent Interfaces),
Time Management (Flexible Reactive Scheduling), and Information Management
(Flexible Information Retrieval).

Technology Themes

• Soft computing.
• Artificial intelligence.
• Intelligent data analysis and neuro-fuzzy systems.
• Multi-agent interaction and neuroscience.
  

Projects

• Intelligent Assistant (IA)
  IA helps people cope with the demands of the information age by providing personalized assistance in telephone and e-mail prioritarisation, filtering information search and retrieval, diary management, match making and potentially much more. The system consists of a number of systems specializing in time, information and communication management.
• Telephone Assistant
  The Telephone Assistant is used for managing interruptions by preventing the phone from ringing for an incoming call, for example. It is a part of the Communication Management in the Intelligent Assistant.
• E-mail Assistant
  The E-mail Assistant is another part of Communication Management. It can be used to give various priorities to incoming e-mail messages.
• Yellow Pages Assistant
  The Yellow Pages Assistant is used for Information Management in the Intelligent Assistant. The Yellow Pages Assistant aims to provide an intelligent search engine for semi-structured data source such as the Yellow Pages and Talking Pages. It allows natural interaction with the user and without the need for detailed knowledge of the classifications.
• Web Assistant
  The Web Assistant acts as the interface between the user and the World Wide Web. It performs appropriate keyword expansion, again based on the user's interests and some common sense knowledge. It employs a meta-search engine that consolidates all the results from many search engines.
• Diary Assistant
  The Diary Assistant helps the user with time management by maintaining a schedule of tasks. The user is able to enter and edit tasks, move tasks from one day to another, save and load particular day sequences, and invoke the scheduling capabilities of the assistant.
  Co-ordinator Assistant
  The Intelligent Assistant includes a specialist Co-ordinator Assistant which manages the interactions between different assistants, and between the user and the assistants.
• Fuzzy Reasoner
  Fuzzy Reasoner is a part of User Interaction Management in the Intelligent Assistant. It maintains the context of the interactions between the user and the system. When the user initiates a new query, it is checked against the context.

Business Systems

The Intelligent Business Systems Research Group is researching smart technologies that will provide the means of creating agile and highly adaptive enterprises of the next millennium. These technologies form an intelligent self-organising enterprise infrastructure which supports:

• coordination of business activities
• knowledge management across enterprises
• collaboration between and within enterprises
• cooperation between distributed users across enterprises

Such technologies will help BT and its customers develop, deliver and maintain products and services with the speed, flexibility, quality and economy that is necessary in the consumer driven society of today.

Technology Themes

• Agent based computing.
• Intelligent business systems.
• Heterogeneous information system interoperability and integration.
  

Projects

• Agent Enhanced Workflow (AEW)
  AEW is a new approach to managing distributed processes and volume work activities. It combines the latest distributed computing technology and autonomous software agent
  techniques with existing workflow technology. It provides an intelligent alternative to workflow management systems, and a vision of how organizations can be structured and managed in the future.
• Ontology Management
  The Ontology Management activity is researching techniques and developing tools to facilitate the integration of information systems through machine-readable and machine-understandable vocabulary. This research and development activity will ensure BT is well positioned to provide leading edge information systems which are flexible, adaptive, and easy to integrate.
• Open Agent Management
  With the development of distributed autonomous systems, such as software agents, the problem of managing these systems is both a research challenge and an obstacle to their commercial exploitation. The IBSR Group is pioneering standards and technology research in the management and monitoring of agent systems. Patterns, Roles, Aspects and Agents. We are currently researching methodologies for analysing and designing agent-based enterprise systems. This activity emphasises patterns because they are living methodologies that are generative and can deal with change. We are also interested in role models which can be used to describe organisations in terms of patterns of collaboration and interaction. Role models can be used to conceptualise, specify, design and implement new organisations made up of people, processes, agents and other entities.
• Self-Organising Adaptive Systems
  We are exploring the subject of Self-organising Adaptive Systems through an activity we call Dynamo: Dynamics of Adaptive Market-based Organisations. The scientific goal of Dynamo is to understand how the actions of self-interested (profit-seeking) agents interacting through the purchase and sale of products and services give rise to emergent collective behaviours at the system level. While the understanding gained through Dynamo will benefit many aspects of BT's business, Dynamo's more specific engineering goal is to learn how to design decentralised management systems which exploit emergent phenomena.
• Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA)
  FIPA is defining agent standards as a means of promoting emerging agent applications, services and products. Currently it has over 44 international member organisations. FIPA97 was issued in October 1997 which included specifications for an agent communication language, agent management facilities and agent software integration. Currently, FIPA is working on FIPA98 which includes specifications on agent mobility, security and ontology management. The IBS Research Group coordinates BT's involvement in FIPA and chairs one of its technical committees.
• European Network of Excellence in AI Planning and Scheduling (PLANET)
  The IBSR Group represents BT within PLANET, the European Network of Excellence in AI Planning and Scheduling. We coordinate the activities of PLANET's Technical Coordination Unit on Workflow Management.

Complex Systems

The Intelligent Complex Systems Research Group is researching intelligent resource planning & scheduling algorithms and systems that will enable BT to fully exploit the potential of workflow systems, middleware software, and intelligent agents by solving the core problems not addressed by these approaches and by doing so in the best possible manner.

Technology Themes

• Intelligent optimisation
• Applied AI
• Constraint optimisation
• Intelligent workflow and resource Management
• Software agents
  

Projects

• Resource Management
  We are developing decision-support systems, which will help resource managers access how best to deploy their resources. To facilitate the development of these systems, we are researching into
  • Job and resource forecasting
  • Resource planning using heuristic search methods
  • Multi-agent negotiation
  • Interactive visualization
• Planning & Scheduling
  ICSR Group's research into planning & scheduling has resulted in the development of an Optimisation Toolkit written entirely in the Java programming language. The toolkit represents a major step towards the development of a complete platform for modelling and solving resource optimisation problems. These problems are known for their difficulty and if addressed properly can contribute significantlly in BT's drive for efficiency since they are at the core of a number of the company's processes.The toolkit supports the following aspects of developing a resource optimisation application:
  • Problem Modelling
  • Problem Solving
  • Interactive Visualisation
    
• Software Agents
  ICSR Group's research into software agents has resulted in the development of the ZEUS agent building tool-kit. ZEUS facilitates the engineering of agent applications; it speeds up development time and encourages code reuse and standardisation of agent technology. Current research themes include multi-agent coordination and negotiation protocols, cooperative and non-cooperative multi-agent systems, organizational self-design, multi-agent adaptation of coordination strategies, compuational economics as well as multi-agent building platform.
• Network Management
  We are investigating the area of feature interaction between different network services (e.g. call forwarding, call minder etc.). Constraint-based approaches have been developed which can model the different services and reason about the potential conflicts between them. This can facilitate the faster introduction of new network services making sure they do not interfere with existing services. Furthemore, it can facilitate the better understanding of the interactions between existing services. Other areas of research include:
  • Broadcast Routing Scheduling: The ICSR Group researched into systems for the routing and scheduling of transimissions in BT's Visual Broadcast Services network which provides services to major UK TV networks.
  • Call Sequencing: A Sequencer system has been developed which played a key role in BT getting regulatory approval by OFTEL for the call charging system of its PSTN and other networks.
    

Evolutionary Systems

Technology Themes

• Biologically-inspired computing and learning.
• Nature inspired and evolutionary computing.
• Malicious and mobile agents.
• Living interfaces.
  

Projects

• An Evolutionary and Ecosystem R&D Platform (EoS)
  The EoS project will support two key goals. Firstly it will allow the Future Technologies Group to rapidly research and develop novel Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) in a consistent framework, and secondly it will support the rapid application of EAs to new problem domains of relevance to BT. Eos will draw upon work and experience within the FTG but will provide a consistent and extensible framework, thus obviating the need to build each new EA from scratch with the wasted effort that entails. Ultimately Eos will provide frameworks, components, and a design methodology for construction of EAs.
• De-centralized Information Ecosystems (DIET)
  DIET is an EU collaborative research project to be funded under the framework V program. It involves partners from Universidad Carlos III in Spain, the Technical University of Crete and DFKI in Germany. Its aim is to construct a robust, adaptable and scaleable software framework for information processing in which software agents can be used to execute information management applications.
• Engineering Security in Future Systems
  This project seeks to tackle challenging issues relating to maintaining security in computational systems built from a distributed agent-based architecture. Solving such issues and developing associated engineering principles should contribute significantly to engineering future systems in a secure manner. This project will complement the DERA Mobile Agent Security Project and help extend that research with a better understanding of the associated longer-range security issues. The DERA project will also bring focus to this research.
• Virtual Inhabited Call Centers (VICC)
  The growth of call centers is exploding world-wide, with an estimated 5% of all people in the UK expected to be working in them by year 2005. At the same time call centers are not pleasant environments to work in, and keeping reliable trained employees is hard. Customers are demanding more from call centers such as choice, flexibility, easy navigation, and intimacy, and the single modality of voice is starting to prove inefficient. The Virtual Inhabited Call Center is a novel web based call center that tries to provide a service to overcome these problems.
• Nature Inspired Computation
  This project will investigate novel solutions to computational problems, drawing upon a wide variety of sources in natural systems. Information from this project will feed into other projects within the Future Technologies Group. Sub-projects:
  • FlyPhones - Abstractions of fruit fly development for channel allocation in cellular networks
  • Development/CellSim - Researching further abstractions from developmental biology
  • Evolvability - Researching methods of making artificial evolutionary systems more evolvable
  • Neutral Networks - Investigating the impact of redundant genetic encodings on evolvability
• Novel systems and architectures
  This project will involve the research and development of novel approaches to key problems faced by BT. The project will use the Eos platform to produce tailored algorithms and solutions to these problems. Sub-projects:
  • NetGrow - Coupling developmental rules and evolution to aid in planning network growth.
  • Metro Ring Design - Evolutionary techniques to design Greenfield SDH networks.
  • Pulsing Nodes - Self-organising, adaptive routing for future networks.
  • Backup Routing - Hybrid GAs for optimizing back-up routes for BTCellnet.
  • Information Filtering - Evolving user profiles for targeted information delivery.
  • Aerial Placement - Evolving aerial locations for minimum cost and maximum coverage.

Showcase

The IS Lab focus on :

• Intelligent resource scheduling and planning.
• Intelligent Software Agents.
• Soft Computing (referring to Fuzzy & Neural technologies).
• Evolutionary computation.

These form the technical basis of our ambitious long term R&D program.

Our world class research status is evidenced by

• 4 International and National IT awards.
• 11 BT Technical awards.
  
• 60 patents granted or filed.
• Over 100 external publications

Equally important to us has been turning the results of this world class research program
into major business benefits for BTexact, for example:

• We are transferring & down streaming our technology to BT's novel agent-based initiatives on
  • Network management in CONCERT,
  • Resource management in CS,
  • E-Commerce, Business Process Mgt, and Knowledge Mgt in BTexact.
• We have developed the Dynamic Scheduling (DS) for BT's work management program which has been nationally rolled out and will soon cover over 28000 field technicians.
• We have developed a novel agent based Knowledge Management tool set which is under trial by over 700 internal users. A version of this system has been delivered to the Global Info Exchange (GIE) program which has the potential of engaging about 15000 BT Global customers and staff.
• Finally, our SC technology lies at the heart of a number on-going trials which we expect to lead to significant down streaming in :
  • Travel and Task mgt in CS, and
  • Call center operations in Yellow Pages.