Interests

As a computer science student, it’s a given that computers are one of my main areas of interest. On this page, I’ll discuss this and other areas in which I have interests. Below is a bulleted summary of the content of this page. If you click the link, it will take you to the appropriate section of this page for you to read further.

Summary

A Wordle of my Transfer Thesis

A Wordle of my Transfer Thesis

My PhD

I’m currently studying for a PhD in computer science under the supervision of Dr. Alex Rogers, and Dr. Enrico Gerding, in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group, at the University of Southampton. Broadly, my PhD follows the research themes of agent-based computing, and computational economics. More specifically, in my PhD, I’m studying how we can use mechanism design in order to obtain specific behaviours from electricity consumers in the smart grid. I’m looking at a problem in which there are numerous consumers, and a single aggregator whose job it is to optimally purchase electricity for the home agents. The supply of electricity must always match the demand — if there is surplus demand, the grid becomes unstable, and if there is surplus supply, money is wasted generating electricity which is unused. Consequently, electricity companies are penalised for purchasing electricity at the ‘last minute’, and thus they receive better rates for planning for their customers’ demand ahead of time.

Currently, companies make predictions of their customers’ future consumptions through the use of historical data and statistical models. However, there exists a wealth of information within each house that can be used in order to more precisely predict the future consumption of that building.

In my PhD, we say each home has an home agent — an intelligent piece of software that autonomously gathers information, which it can then use to construct a prediction of its houses’ consumption. The home agent, is completely autonomous, and interacts with the electricity aggregator, represented by an aggregator agent, in order to transmit a prediction to the aggregator that it believes will maximise its net payoff (i.e. the amount it is rewarded minus the cost of generating the prediction).

The rewards given to the home agents must be carefully designed in order to ensure the home agents behave appropriately. If the home agents find that they are able to gain a higher reward when either they ‘guess’ their consumption, without taking into account any information, or lie about their estimate (for example, to make it seem as though they’re more confident in it), then they will do just this. Of course, for the aggregator, this isn’t beneficial as it will be using incorrect data in order to try to optimally purchase electricity for its customers. Consequently, rewards must be designed such that the home agent expects to maximise its reward only when he reports its true estimate.

I’m also incorporating other incentives into the rewards in order to promote the efficient use of electricity. For example, wildly varying loads being placed on the grid are responsible for a large amount of waste. In order to cope with unexpected demand, there are reserve generators, constantly spinning but not outputting to the grid until the demand is placed. This results in increased emissions, and a greater cost of electricity. By encouraging users make their use of electricity more constant (or by employing technology to do so autonomously), we can reduce the need for standby generation and increase the efficiency of the grid.

An important part of this work is to learn the behaviours of the home agents under such schemes. For example, agents’ behaviours should be analysed in order to discover any undesirable side effects. It could be, for example, that when basing agents’ rewards on their predictions, they have an incentive to needlessly burn electricity to match their predictions when they discover they will consume less than they initially predicted.

Of course, this is just a very brief overview of my PhD. For those who are interested, I plan to include a list of publications on this site soon.

Computers and Technology

Artificial Intelligence

I’ve always been interested in technology, and I’ve had computers around me for as long as I can remember. I’m particularly interested in artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Of particular interest to me currently are neural networks and genetic algorithms, which I hope to read more about in the near future.

Security

In addition, I’m interested in data and network security. Digital forensics is an area that I find particularly interesting, and is something that I’d love to learn more about, and gain experience. Data forensics and cryptography are really interesting to me. It’s fascinating to discover how data that was previously thought to be deleted can be recovered, and how data can be hidden away by potentially malicious users. Another area I find interesting, but alas know very little about at the time of writing, is the design of malware. I find it very interesting how one executable can infect another and spread itself around the internet, and how rootkits can be developed in order to coerce the operating system into hiding or even protecting the infection.

Audio Synthesis

I’m also interested in audio synthesis and digital signal processing. I’ve created a couple of effects, and a synthesiser of my own, which, over the past year or so, I have not had much chance to continue (it turns out, doing a PhD takes rather a lot of your time). I’m a keen user of tools such as Ableton Live, and Reason in order to create my own music, which I will talk about in the next section.

Electronics and Sensor Networks

Two other areas that interest me are electronics and sensor networks. I have a number of arduinos, which I have programmed to perform various tasks including logging environmental conditions, although currently I mainly use a current cost in order to create logs of my house’s electrical consumption, and temperature. I plan to deploy some arduinos around the house, measuring temperatures and other variables in various rooms. I’d quite like to get my hands on some pressure and humidity sensors as well as O2, and CO2 sensors too.

I’m also learning to program ATMega and PIC chips so that I can do away with the arduino (as it ends up being rather expensive, buying a new arduino for each deployment…). For information on other projects that I’ve been doing, see my `projects’ blog, Beyond All Repair.

Music

Instruments

I’ve been playing musical instruments for as long as I can remember. When I was young, my parents started me off on the clarinet, which I continued to play until I left for University at the age of 18. Around my teens, I also began to play the alto saxophone, which I again continued until I left for University. I left most of my instruments at home while at university due the the cost of insuring them, and the fact that university accommodation was quite densely populated.

During college (that is, my A-Levels — 16-18 years of age), I began to play the acoustic guitar, which I’ve continued on and off to the present day. In addition, I play the electric guitar and the bass. I’d say the bass is now the main instrument I play, although I still enjoy playing my guitars.

DJing and Musical Genres

I listen to, and play a range of different styles. For listening, I mainly listen to either tech-, progressive-, and minimal-house. I also `DJ’ using Traktor. For those of you who would like to listen, some of my sets can be found on Mixcloud.

In addition, I also enjoy listening to metal and rock; genres which I tend to play on bass too. I listen to and play music by bands such as (in no particular order) Tool, Slipknot, Pink Floyd, Jamiroquai, Porcupine Tree, Primus, Rage Against the Machine, and Alanis Morisette. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Composition

I enjoy trying to create my own dance music (or sometimes other genres). As of yet, I don’t have much on the internet, but when I upload any tracks, I’ll most likely publish them to my Soundcloud account. My DAW of choice is Ableton Live. However, I also enjoy using Reason. I tend to stick to using the stock instruments for Ableton, but I hope to write my own instrument in order to create a unique (and hopefully palatable) sound. The only external instrument I sometimes use is Massive. An excellent effect that I like to use is Illformed’s Glitch VST, which is great fun to play around with.