Matt Oates Complexity Sciences PhD Student Department of Computer Science Intelligent Systems Laboratory The Merchant Venturers Building, Room 0.00 Woodland Road Bristol BS8 1UB, United Kingdom Email: Matt.Oates@bristol.ac.uk

Project Information

• Supervisors: Dr Julian Gough (Computer Science) and Prof Alistair Hetherington (School of Biological Sciences)
• Started: September 2010 (previous work start date January 2010)
• Funding: BCCS Student Grant - EPSRC Funded
• Research: The evolution of cellular function over all sequenced genomes.
  
• Description:
  

Academic Background

• 2010 - PhD (prior work) Evolutionary Swarm Robotics
• 2010 - MRes in Complexity Sciences from the University of Bristol. My masters thesis involved investigating the evolution of Calcium cell signalling over evolution of all currently sequenced genomes. Hopefully what I have learned from cell signalling will aid in the design of swarm robotic systems. This is a real advantage of interdisciplinary institutions such as the BRL and BCCS.
• 2007 - BSc in Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence from Aberystwyth University. My undergrad dissertation looked at introducing a symbiotic operator to a Genetic Algorithm in a Multi Agent simulation.

Previously (2008) I have worked as a research assistant in the Centre for Catchment & Coastal Research part of the Institute for Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth. The most notable academic work throughout the year was the integration of a high-definition laser scanner with a rugged robotic chassis, designed to repeatedly scan large scale riverbeds. This year of work extended my undergraduate degree at Aberystwyth University doing a BSc in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (2003-2007). My degree concluded in a dissertation focused on implementing a symbiogenetic operator in a Genetic Algorithm to help preserve coupling between loci, and to try and speed up adoption of highly fit partial solutions in a non discriminatory way. During the middle of my undergrad degree I took time out for a year in "industry". I accepted a student programmer placement (2006) in the Remote Sensing Group at Plymouth Marine Laboratories, where I was responsible for the development of a batch data ordering/processing system for Antarctic satellite data. This work was funded as part of the Rothera ARIES Data Archive project.