About Me
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, and 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. 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).
Terry’s research is in the area of agent-based computing and knowledge-based systems and services for the last 30 years, and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in the area. His specific interest is in the use of ontological knowledge for the support of agent-based service discovery and provision and is currently exploring the exploration of dialogue-based negotiation approaches to establish contextually-relevant ontological alignment between interacting agents on the fly. This supports the longer term aim of describing, discovering and utilising capability descriptions that agents offer or exploit when collaborating within open and pervasive environments, such as within smart scientific laboratory settings.
He has received numerous research awards, including a Best Industrial Paper award in 2006, and two Distinguished Research paper awards in 2011 & 2012 that recognised his fundamental contribution to his research field his research. He was Program co-chair for the [International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)](https://iswc2023.semanticweb.org} in 2023, and is a member of SWSA - the Semantic Web Science Association, responsible for promoting and exchanging scholarly work in Semantic Web and related fields throughout the world. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Authority (SFHEA), and was also awarded a University Learning & Teaching Excellence award in 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022 for innovative and technology enhanced teaching. His teaching was also recognised by the student body in 2016 when he was awarded the Guild of Students Best Teacher (Faculty of Science) Award.