Jon Rowe's Student Projects
Modelling plant growth with L-systems
L-systems are rather like "grammars" for specifying the rules of natural
growth. They have been used to build realistic graphics of plants and trees
and other natural phenomena. This project would investigate a range of applications
of this representation scheme.
Spatial dynamics of disease transmission.
Standard models of disease transmission assume that anyone in a population can infect anyone else (perfect mixing).
It is likely that, when a population is distributed so that people can only infect those nearest them, the way in which the disease
spreads will be different. This project will be an empirical study of these effects.
Genetic representations and operators for combinatorial problems
A number of differerent representations and operators have been suggested
for problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) but as yet there
is no clear understanding of the best way to do this. This project would
look at the TSP and other combinatorial problems and try to come up with
a principled way of designing genetic operators for them, and perform empirical studies on their effectiveness.
Local search and distribution of optima
It is thought that the distribution of optimal points in a search space affects different local search algorithms in different ways.
This project will investigate this relation by studying a number of optimisation problems and local search algorithms.
The goal is to find a simple descriptor of a search space that correlates with the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Theory of evolutionary algorithms
I am happy to supervise projects that look at theoretical aspects of evolutionary
algorithms. However, this will be very mathematical, in addition to requiring
good programming skills. Only ask me about these if you are prepared to do
the maths!