LSCITS: Large Scale Complex IT Systems

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Professor Dave Cliff Dave's picture

Director, UK LSCITS Initiative

Department of Computer Science University of Bristol
The Merchant Venturers Building,
Room 3.30
Woodland Road
Bristol
BS8 1UB,
United Kingdom

Phone: +44 (0)117 3315105

Fax: +44 (0)117 9545208

Email: dc@cs.bris.ac.uk



Vivienne Paulete is the LSCITS Project Administrator, viv.paulete@bristol.ac.uk, + 44 117 9545371

Vacancies:

Please note, I have no funds available to provide short-term summer internships to prospective interns from outside the UK.

Background

Prior to joining the University of Bristol in 2007, I'd held faculty posts at the University of Sussex School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science. I'd also spent roughly half my career working as a researcher in industry: initially for Hewlett-Packard Labs, where I ended up as a Department Scientist; and latterly for Deutsche Bank London, where I was a Director/Trader in their Foreign Exchange Complex Risk Group.

Since October 2005 I have been Director of the UK Research and Training Initiative in the Science and Engineering of Large-Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS). This is funded by almost ?10m of UK public funds (from EPSRC), with significant support from partners in industry and the UK public sector. Further details of the LSCITS Initiative are available at www.lscits.org.

Most of my personal research work in the ten years before I got involved in LSCITS was centered on adaptive automated trading systems for various types of markets, and on automated design of market mechanisms. I started doing this in 1995, for market-based control of ultra-large-scale data-centres. In 2001 a team at IBM showed my "ZIP" trading software beating human traders, which got the attention of various companies in the global financial markets. More on that here.

For my biography, at varying resolutions, see here.

Research Interests

Publications, and citation indices

In recent years, academics have started to care a lot about so-called scientometrics, the metrics by which science output is measured. Despite the manifestly multidimensional and multiobjective nature of an academic career, there is a collective determination in some quarters to boil an entire lifetime's research output down into a single number. Two popular numbers are the h-index and the g-index. There is a wonderful free tool called Publish Or Perish (PoP) available from www.harzing.com that interrogates Google Scholar to calculate a whole bunch of these highly questionable informative metrics for any given author. Unfortunately, Google Scholar sometimes gets confused by the typesetting of my surname, so to find my metrics via PoP you need to search for papers by me, and also for papers by my alter-ego "Dave Cli". You also need to exclude a bunch of other people with initial D and surname Cliff. If you'd like to see recent output from PoP doing all of that (where it reckons my h is 30 and my g is 60), click here.

Some recent peer-reviewed publications of mine are:

And some significant reports and briefing papers that, although they were informally reviewed by various of my peers as part of their commissioning and approval process, were nevertheless not subject to formal peer-review, include:

More complete details of my publications are available here...

Current PhD and EngD Students

Other Information

Teaching

 

Dave Cliff's bibliography