I have spent the last week and a bit talking to people at the School of Computer Science here at Birmingham University about doing a PhD. This week it's been formally agreed!

I'm going to be working with Professor Xin Yao, with the title Autonomic Solutions for Virtualised ICT Systems. I'm going to be funded through an EPSRC CASE studentship, in part funded by BT Labs for three and a half years. The full description of the project is as follows:

Future virtualised ICT resources (e.g. pervasive Grid systems) will be subject to dynamically changing customer demand, and will have to be highly autonomic (self-managing, self-healing, self-organising) in order to respond to this and provide appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This project will focus on the key task of developing autonomic agents for supporting SLAs in a changing ICT environment. Evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary games will be used as models of interactions between agents where agents engage in markets inspired by trading resources in real-world scenarios (such as bandwidth, quality of service, etc.) Markets will be used as a means of controlling the interaction between agents in order to support the SLA. A likely evolutionary game model would be the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Evolutionary computation may be used to learn effective strategies in this model. This will be used as a basis for comparison to previous research. Issues such as robustness of the learned solutions to uncertain environments will be studied. The research is expected to provide better indications of how to engineer and distribute populations of software agents so as to make them effectively autonomic in a dynamic service-based ICT environment.

Sound like fun? I think so! I start next month.