My Academic Writing
I'm very much a fledgling academic, but I have written a few essays and papers, which I reproduce below:
Distributed Combinatorial Resource Scheduling
Available in Adobe PDF format. 10 pages. Submitted to AAMAS05.
Grid computations will be enabled by participants trading resources in order to construct bundles of goods or services that together represent experiments or solve problems in science, engineering and, now emerging, social sciences. A combinatorial auction (CA) is the usual solution, but the space and time dimensions that characterize a Grid mean it is incompatible. We propose that an analogue of a physical commodities market seems more appropriate and that there remains a class of bundling problem which exhibits complexity properties which mean it is impractical to utilise a CA.
We describe a simulation environment, BrickWorld, that comprises a distributed tier of !TraderAgents" and multiple distributed single item auctions (MDAs).We consider the issues associated with the complexity of bundling, in particular attempting to provide useful combinations of items in situations when the multi-dimensionality of the bundle would make it impractical to finish the NP-complete optimisation successfully in the soft real-time setting that is the Grid. We present an evaluation strategy which helps us demonstrate that for small bundling problems, a single CA continues to provide a high level of performance, but as the complexity level of the problem increases and the problem becomes distributed our system pf MDAs may prove more effective.
Overview of Grid Scheduling Systems
Available in Adobe PDF format. 11 pages
Current efforts in Grid Computing operate on a zero settlement basis with users on the Internet downloading computation engines for ``good causes'' and subsequently returning their results.
A number of attempts, for example Condor-G, GRaDS and Nimrod-G, have been made to develop computational economy based scheduling systems.
However, these systems operate on a ``top down'' basis and have a number of limitations, in that they assume knowledge of all the jobs on the grid, they require the ability to manage the scheduling of jobs on grid nodes and they assume a direct linkage between the ``grid to node'' and ``within node'' scheduling processes.
Our work in the area is focused on examining how we may use multi-agent systems to develop a market place for the trading of computational grid resources such that grid scheduling is completed without the limitations of the ``top down'' approach.
Grid Scheduling with Agents
Available in Adobe PDF format. This is a shorter version of the above paper.
Current efforts in Grid Computing operate on a zero settlement basis with users on the Internet downloading computation engines for ``good causes'' and subsequently returning their results.
A number of attempts, for example Condor-G, GRaDS and Nimrod-G, have been made to develop computational economy based scheduling systems.
However, these systems operate on a ``top down'' basis and have a number of limitations, in that they assume knowledge of all the jobs on the grid, they require the ability to manage the scheduling of jobs on grid nodes and they assume a direct linkage between the ``grid to node'' and ``within node'' scheduling processes.
Our work in the area is focused on examining how we may use multi-agent systems to develop a market place for the trading of computational grid resources such that grid scheduling is completed without the limitations of the ``top down'' approach.
Security Survey
Available in Adobe PDF format. 18 pages.
In this paper we discuss the current techniques and technologies being used and developed in the software engineering industry to protect electronic transactions across public networks. We discuss the issues that form a basis for the provision of trust, privacy and security. We consider initiatives such as the Secure Electronic Transaction protocol (SET) and the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS). Finally we consider advances in digital money, electronic settlement systems and methods to support anonymous, non-repudiatable transactions of all values.
