Jane Hillston is Professor of Quantitative Modelling in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science.
Studying Smart Cities as Collective Adaptive Systems
Many natural systems exhibit properties of collective adaptive systems — large numbers of simple agents interacting based on local knowledge and adapting their behaviour to what they perceive in their neighbourhood. In the QUANTICOL project we have been developing quantitative modelling techniques inspired by collective adaptive systems and using them to study smart city scenarios, particularly transportation systems. The resulting language, CARMA (Collective Adaptive Resource-sharing Markovian Agents), provides a rich modelling environment that can be used to investigate resource allocation and performance in a variety of collective adaptive systems.
Biography
Jane Hillston is Professor of Quantitative Modelling in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science.
Prof Hillston received the BA and MS degrees in Mathematics from the University of York (UK) and Lehigh University (USA), respectively.
After a brief period working in industry, She received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in 1994. Her work on the stochastic process algebra PEPA was recognised by the British Computer Society in 2004 who awarded her the first Roger Needham Award. She was elected to fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007.
Her principal research interests are in formal approaches to modelling the dynamic behaviour of systems, particularly performance modelling.
