Catriona M. Kennedy

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Research interests

• Software architectures for cognitive systems and autonomic systems. Special interest in metareasoning (also called meta-cognition) and self-understanding. Member of euCognition.
  
  
• Applications of cognitive systems to real-world scenarios, such as distributed information systems (e.g. involving Semantic Web), autonomic management (including network security), critical infrastructure management and autonomous systems (including robotics).
  
  
• Software agents and interactive environments to support human creativity, decision-making and meta-cognition. Example domains include online research, learning and deliberation.
  
  
• Reasoning about social and ethical issues.
  
  
• Participatory determination of requirements and semantics for information systems (e.g. ontologies to support research) and for automated infrastructure management (e.g. resource allocation, security and fault-tolerance requirements);
  
  
• Experimental environments and rapid-prototyping tools for informal exploraton and testing of designs, and for participatory involvement in their evolution.

Current work

My involvement with e-Science began when I worked with Georgios Theodoropoulos on intelligent decision support systems in the social sciences. Our primary collaborators were in the School of Public Policy. We recently completed a study entitled "Adaptive Intelligent Modelling for the Social Sciences (AIMSS)". Details are here. This was a small grant project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and was coordinated by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) in Manchester. I have also spent six months at NCeSS as a visiting researcher. As a result of that visit, and the experience of the AIMSS project, I have started to investigate the role of Web 2.0 in participatory determination of semantics for information systems in the social sciences.

My PhD thesis was "Distributed Reflective Architectures for Anomaly Detection and Autonomous Recovery" and is available in the Cognition and Affect Directory. The aim of the research was to explore architectures which allow an autonomous system to detect and recover from anomalies without user intervention. An anomaly is any event that deviates from the model-predicted state of the world and may also occur in the system's own software or hardware. This means that the system must have a model of its own operation (reflection). Recently I have been extending this work to include some aspects of human-like meta-cognition.

The thesis was inspired by various branches of philosophy and biology, in particular by autopoiesis theory, immune system models and Minsky's Society of Mind concept. Some consultation with dependability researchers also took place. The SimAgent package was used as a simulation tool for conceptual exploration and rapid prototyping.

The research addressed the problem of ensuring that critical requirements are met in anomalous situations (e.g. software failure due to intrusions or design flaws). Moreover, the system should focus attention on the most "critical" anomalies and ignore others. E.g. some software anomalies may only occasionally cause delays or minor inaccuracies, while others can cause the whole system to fail, in particular if they are due to deliberate intrusion.

Summary of my background:

OTHER INFORMATION

This file is maintained by Catriona Kennedy
Last updated December 2008