Andrew Tuson

Assistant Dean (Student Recruitment)

Dr Andrew Tuson
Assistant Dean (Student Recruitment)
Room: A309A
Department of Computing
School of Informatics
City University
London EC1V OHB

andrewt@soi.city.ac.uk
tel: +44 20 7040 8164
fax: +44 20 7040 8845

Short Biography

Dr Andrew Tuson is the Assistant Dean (Student Recruitment) for the School of Informatics at City University London (from March 2010). He was formerly the Head of the Department of Computing (July 2007 - Feb 2010). Originally educated as a chemist (MA Chemistry, 2:1, Oxford, 1995), he then changed direction to undertake research in artificial intelligence (AI) and studied for a MSc (with distinction, 1996) and a PhD at Edinburgh University's former AI department under Dr Peter Ross, from where he graduated in July 2000. He completed (with distinction) an MBA in Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education, University of London.

As a member of City's Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (AIS) group, he has been research-active in the fields of evolutionary computation and neighbourhood search optimisation since 1994, and has authored over 30 peer-reviewed papers, of which 8 are in international journals. He also holds membership of the British Computer Society (BCS), the BCS Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (BCS-SGAI), the Operational Research Society (ORS), and the Society for Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB).

In addition, Dr Tuson has been actively involved in organising conferences, most notably as the Publicity Chair for the discpline-leading International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-05), held in Edinburgh in August 2005. He has served as chair of the Operational Research Society's Local Search Study Group, and a committee member of the British Computer Society's Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence.

Dr Tuson has completed one DERA-funded research grant, and a EPSRC/DERA-funded research grant, totalling over 70,000 pounds, as well as a CASE award with DERA (2000-2003). He is the main supervisor for 4 PhD students (Andrews, Bowkis, Davidson, Zhang), and two completed PhD students (Gong, Parkinson).

Contact Hours

I have set drop-in office hours for personal tutees to come by for pastoral issues, and in support of the Final Year and Masters Individual Project students I supervise. For the spring term (from w/b 25/1) they are:

Monday 12-2pm (except 22/3)
Monday 5-6pm (except -)
Tuesday 10-11am (except -)
Wednesday 5-6pm (except 17/3, 24/3, 31/3, 21/4)

Meetings outside of these times are possible by mutually agreed appointment - email me to set this up (and see below regarding good practice).

IMPORTANT: Surgery support for IN1006: Systems Architecture is delivered by our teaching assistants - contact Aravin Naren for details. I will able to answer queries in scheduled lectures, tutorials and on CitySpace discussion boards.

Please note the following:

Don't drop by my office at a whim - chances are I won't be in (teaching, meetings) or unavailable as I'm dealing with someone else.
If its a question about a module - use Cityspace so all can benefit!
Don't leave critical issues until the last minute - we can't drop our schedules at a drop of a hat (this is not a career-enhancing move in the IT industry either).
On a related note, trying to bring such issues up at 5pm on a Friday is never a good idea (either here or in the IT industry....).
It's always a good idea to email in advance - I may be able to help without having you come to my office (and hopefully more quickly).
Make sure your mailbox isn't full before sending an email - nothing is more disheartening to send a response and see it bounce!
This is not a 24/7 service as I may need to eat, sleep etc or be off-site on university business. Two working days is a reasonable time to wait (I'll make best efforts to be a quick as possible, of course).
Please use clear business English in emails - you do want to be an IT professional, don't you?

Research Interests

Dr Tuson's main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the principled design of neighbourhood search and evolutionary optimisers, and their application to practical problems such as those in scheduling, operational research, engineering, musical composition, chemistry, and resource redistribution in the developing world. He has also investigated more fundamental issues in evolutionary computation such as self-adaptation (tuning), and the use of biological ideas of sexual selection.

Research areas of secondary interest include other `adaptive' AI/soft-computing methods such as fuzzy logic, rough sets, CBR, machine learning, and neural networks.

Selected Publications

A. L. Tuson and S. A. Harrison (2005). The Problem Difficulty of Real Instances of Convoy Planning. Journal of the Operational Research Society, to appear (ISSN 0160-5682).
A. L. Tuson, P. Ross and T. Duncan (2005). Evolutionary Search at the Knowledge Level. To appear in the 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.
A. L. Tuson (2004). Heuristic Initialisation: A Knowledge Level Perspective. In the 24th Workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group, (ISSN 1368-5708).
A.L. Tuson (2004). Are Ordinal Representations Effective? In Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXI, Springer Verlag.
M. Andrews and A.L. Tuson (2003). Diversity Does Not Necessarily Imply Adaptability. In the Workshop on Evolutionary Algorithms for Dynamic Optimisation Problems at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2003), pages 24-28, Chicago, IL.
A. C. Tan, D. Gilbert and A.L. Tuson (2002). Characterisation of FAD-family Folds using a Machine Learning Approach. In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Bioinformatics, (InCOB 2002), (ISBN 9742292019).

A Last Word

"...as soon as we started programming, we found that to our surprise that it wasn`t as easy to get programs right as we thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realised that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs..."

Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949.