Dr James A. R. Marshall

• "Optimal Collective Decision-Making in Social Insect Colonies" (BBSRC) - Principal Investigator
• "ADEPT: Adaptive Dynamic Ensemble Prediction Techniques" (EPSRC) - Co-Investigator

Previous research projects:

• "AIBACS: Social Insects, Simulated Evolution and Biologically Inspired Algorithms" (EPSRC/BBSRC) - Co-Investigator

I am always interested in hearing from high quality PhD candidates whose research interests align with my own. Studentships are also available for the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences, in which I am involved.

I am currently advising the following PhD students:

• Tom Cassey ("Social Insect Inspired Algorithms for Decentralised Control of Distributed Systems": co-supervisor Dave Cliff, part sponsored by HP Labs)
• Tom Hinton ("Novel Approaches to Logistics Network Optimisation": CASE studentship with Eurobios UK)
• Matt Oates (BCCS student winter project with Alan Winfield (Bristol Robotics Lab) and Nigel Franks to implement collective decision-making in robots using mechanisms observed in Temnothorax albipennis)
• Pete Trimmer ("Evolution of Personality": co-supervisors John McNamara and Alasdair Houston)

• Academic Editor - PLoS ONE I am a member of the editorial board for PLoS ONE
• Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences - I am the Computer Science representative on the Implementation Group for the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences
• LSCITS - I am an 'Associate Faculty' member of the Large Scale Complex IT Systems initiative, which launched in October 2007.
• MCB - The Bristol and Bath area is home to a high concentration of international quality research groups working at the interface between mathematics, computer science, and biology. To highlight this, we established the Regional Network on Mathematics, Computation and Biology in June 2004.
• Predictive Life Sciences - With Tom Troscianko, Department of Experimental Psychology, I established a University Research Theme on 'Information Processing in Biological Systems'. This has now been subsumed by the Predictive Life Sciences University Research Theme.

My main scientific collaborations are currently with

• Nigel Franks, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
• John McNamara, Department of Mathematics, University of Bristol
• Alasdair Houston, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
• Tom Seeley, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University
• Anna Dornhaus, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona
• Mike Mendl, Department of Clinical Veterinary Science, University of Bristol
• Liz Paul, Department of Clinical Veterinary Science, University of Bristol

• Colony-Level Cognition: Optimal Decisions, Brains, and Social Insect Colonies. July 29th 2009. 'Swarm Cognition' workshop at CogSci 2009, Amsterdam.
• Optimal Decision-Making in Brains and Social Insect Colonies. June 20th 2008. Systems Biology of Decision-Making Meeting. Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Ohio State University.
• Optimal Decision-Making in Brains and Social Insect Colonies. May 20th 2008. Principles of Biological Computation Meeting. Santa Fe Institute.
• Whys and Wherefores of Computer Modelling in Behavioural Biology. 10th July 2004. Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Vienna.

(for full list see Departmental database)

Journal and Preprints

• Marshall, J. A. R. & Hinton, T. G. (2009) Beyond no free lunch: realistic algorithms for arbitrary problem classes. arXiv.org (Information Theory) [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R. (2009) The donation game with roles played between relatives. Journal of Theoretical Biology 260, 386-391 [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R. & Franks, N. R. (2009) Colony-level cognition. Current Biology 19, R395-R396 [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R., Bogacz, R., Dornhaus, A. Planqué, R., Kovacs, T. & Franks, N. R. (2009) On optimal decision making in brains and social insect colonies. Journal of the Royal Society: Interface 6, 959-1102. [PDF]
• Trimmer, P., Bogacz, R., Houston, A. I., Marshall, J. A. R., McNamara, J. M., Mendl, M., Paul, E. (2008) Mammalian choices: combining fast-but-innacurate and slow-but-accurate decision-making systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B: Biological Sciences 275, 2353-2361 [PDF]
• Franks, N. R., Hooper, J. W., Gumn, M., Bridger, T. H., Marshall, J. A. R., Gross, R. & Dornhaus, A. (2007) Moving targets: collective decisions and flexible choices in house-hunting ants. Swarm Intelligence 2, 81-94 [PDF]
• Planqué, R., Dechaume-Moncharmont, F. X., Franks, N. R., Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2007) Why do house-hunting ants recruit in both directions? Naturwissenschaften 94, 1028-1042 [PDF]
• Planqué, R., Dornhaus, A., Franks, N. R., Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2007) Weighting waiting in collective decision-making. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 61, 347-356 [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R., Dornhaus, A., Franks, N. R. & Kovacs, T. (2006) Noise, cost and speed-accuracy trade-offs: decision making in a decentralized system. Journal of the Royal Society: Interface 3, 243-254 [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R. & Rowe, J. E. (2003) Viscous populations and their support for reciprocal cooperation. Artificial Life 9: 3, 327-334 [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R. & Rowe, J. E. (2003) Kin selection may inhibit the evolution of reciprocation. Journal of Theoretical Biology 222: 3, 331-335 [PDF]
• ...

• Marshall, J. A. R., Brown, G. & Kovacs, T. (2007) Bayesian estimation of rule accuracy in UCS. In: Proceedings of the 2007 GECCO Conference Companion on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, 2831-2834. ACM Press
• Brown, G, Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (2007) UCSpv: Principled voting in UCS rule populations. In: H. Lipson et al. (eds.) Proceedings of GECCO'07 (vo. 2), 1774-1781. ACM Press
• Marshall, J. A. R., Kovacs, T. (2006) A representational ecology for learning classifier systems. In: M. Keijzer et al. (eds.) Proceedings of GECCO'06 (vol. 2), 1529-1536. ACM Press
• Marshall, J. A. R. (2005) Collective action selection in social insect colonies. In: Bryson et al. (eds.) Modelling Natural Action Selection: Proceedings of an International Workshop, 143-145. AISB Press
• Cayzer, S., Smith, J., Marshall, J. A. R. & Kovacs, T. (2005) What have gene libraries done for AIS? In: C. Jacob et al. (eds.) ICARIS 2005: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3627, 86-99
• Marshall, J. A. R. & Tokumine, S. (2004) See how she runs: towards visualising artificial red queen evolution. In: J. Pollack et al. (eds.) Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference, 334-339. MIT Press [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R., Kovacs, T., Dornhaus, A. R. & Franks, N. R. (2003) Simulating the evolution of ant behaviour in evaluating nest sites. In: W. Banzhaf et al. (eds.) Advances in Artificial Life - Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2003), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2801, 643-650. Springer Verlag [PDF]
• Marshall, J. A. R. & Rowe, J. E. (2000) Investigating the mechanisms underlying cooperation in viscous population multi-agent systems. In: M. Bedau et al. (eds.) Artificial Life VII: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference, 348-352. MIT Press [PDF (updated from proceedings version)]
• ...

• Marshall, J. A. R., Bogacz, R., Planqué, R., Kovacs, T. & Franks, N. R. (2009) On optimal decision making in brains and social insect colonies. In: Seth et al. (eds.) Modelling Natural Action Selection. Cambridge University Press (in press).
• Franks, N. R., Dornhaus, A., Marshall, J. A. R. & Dechaume-Moncharmont, F. X. (2009) The dawn of a golden age in mathematical insect sociobiology. In: Gadau and Fewell (eds.) Organization of Insect Societies. Harvard University Press.
• Marshall, J. A. R. & Franks, N. R. (2007) Computer modelling in behavioral and evolutionary ecology: whys and wherefores. In: Laubichler and Müller (eds.) Modelling Biology - Structures, Behaviors, Evolution. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology, MIT Press.

• Marshall, J. A. R. (2004) Review of "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" by S. J. Gould. Artificial Life 10: 1, 113-115 [PDF]
• ...

• Proceedings of AISB'06: Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems (vols. 1, 2 and 3). Kovacs, T. & Marshall, J. A. R. (eds). SSAISB, 2006. [PDF] [PDF] [PDF]

• Marshall, J. A. R. (2002) An Investigation into Kin Selection and Reciprocal Cooperation in a Viscous Population [PS.GZ]

• UCS.zip - UCS
• XCSphere.tar.gz - XCSphere
• EPD-2.1.2-2.1.1.tar.gz - Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma and E3D
• Buffon-1.0-2.2.tar.gz - Buffon's Needle
• Spatialised Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma [Nowak & May] [Axelrod]

I will teach on the following courses for 2009/10:

• COMS11700: Theory of Computation (unit director)
• COMSM0204: Advanced Topics in Machine Learning (unit director)
• Computational Methods for Complex Systems - Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences (notes on Cellular Automata)

• My science and research bookmarks