Department of Computer Science

Faculty of Science and Engineering,

University of Liverpool,

Ashton Building, Ashton Street,

Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

Terry has been actively working in the research field of Distributed AI and Multi-Agent Systems since 1994.  Winner of several research and teaching awards, he is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, where he heads the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Research Group.  In addition to teaching final year research-led subjects (on Robotics, and Multi-Agent Systems), he is the Academic Lead for Student Recruitment, Admissions and Widening Participation for the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

His research interests are primarily in the use of ontological knowledge for the support of agent / service discovery and provision.  He has also worked on coalition formation and self-organising agent communities, as well as machine learning for adaptive agents.  After originally graduating with a BSc in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Kent (at Canterbury) in 1990, he spent three formative years in industry as a Software Engineer, before returning to academia to study for an MSc in Applied AI, and a PhD in Machine Learning at the Computing Science Department, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. 

He moved to Pittsburgh, USA to work at the Intelligent Software Agents Laboratory, part of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, before taking up a faculty position at the University of Southampton, and later, at the University of Liverpool.  Since becoming faculty, he has also spent time as a visiting scientist at several international universities; including the Mindswap labs at UMD, the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Nokia Research Center, Cambridge, and CSAIL (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

He regularly serves the Program Committees for top AI, Agents, and Semantic Web conferences, and is on the editorial board for the Journal of Web Semantics.  He has previously served on the editorial boards for IEEE Intelligent Systems (where he also ran a “department” on Agents), JAAMAS - the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and for a while was one of the co-editors in chief for the Electronic Commerce Research and Applications Journal.  He chaired the 2003 and 2005 AAAI Symposia on Agents and Semantic Web Services; was program co-chair for the Tenth Cooperative Information Agents Workshop in 2006, and the Tenth International Conference on Electronic Commerce in 2008. He co-authored the W3C OWL-S Service Description Language Recommendation Note; and in 2004-06, he jointly coordinated AgentLink III - an EU funded Coordination Action Project for Agent-Based Computing.