My main research interests are in evolutionary computing, in neural nets and in AI generally. Recent research includes work on timetabling and on scheduling among other things, but I'm interested in all aspects of evolutionary computing and neural nets and indeed AI. It seems to me that AI is starting to get interesting, and that one of the main lines of its development will be through the evolution of non-standard forms of neural net for storage and reasoning. I'd be very surprised if it didn't turn out to be crucial to have a rich, continuous and highly-structured stream of inbound sensory information in order to keep everything dynamically stable and growing. The study of the plastic/elastic balance in dynamical systems is probably a good place to start.
There is a local group of staff and students working on evolutionary computing. It has its own web page.
Someday I'll get all/most of my papers online and available from here - those that are available are in gzipped postscript form. Some recent ones include:
Peter Ross and Dave Corne, ``Comparing Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, and Stochastic Hillclimbing on Timetabling Problems'', Evolutionary Computing 2, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed T.C.Fogarty, 1995. Dave Corne and Peter Ross, ``Some Combinatorial Landscapes on which a Genetic Algorithm Outperforms Other Stochastic Iterative Methods'', Evolutionary Computing 2, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed T.C.Fogarty, 1995. P.M.Ross, D.Corne, H-L. Fang, ``Improving Evolutionary Timetabling with Delta Evaluation and Directed Mutation'', in Parallel Problem Solving From Nature III, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 866, pp. 556--565, 1994. C.Gathercole, P.M.Ross, ``Dynamic Training Subset Selection for Supervised Learning in Genetic Programming'', in Parallel Problem Solving From Nature III, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 866, pp. 312--321, 1994. D.Corne, P.M.Ross, H-L. Fang, ``Fast Practical Evolutionary Timetabling'', in Evolutionary Computing: AISB Workshop 1994, Selected papers, Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 865, T. Fogarty (ed), Springer Verlag, 1994. E.Perez-Minana, P.Ross and J.Hallam, ``Multi-layer preceptron design using Delaunay triangulation'', IEEE/Nagoya University WWW 95 Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Neural Networks/Evolutionary Computation, Nagoya University, Nov 1995, pp.104-109 P.M.Ross, D.Corne and H.Terashima, ``The phase transition niche for evolutionary algorithms in timetabling'', Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, Napier University, Sep 1995, pp.269-282 D.Corne and P.M.Ross, ``Peckish initialisation strategies for evolutionary timetabling'', Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, Napier University, Sep 1995, pp.269-282 K.Kado, P.M.Ross, D.Corne, ``A study of genetic algorithm hybrids for facility layout problems'', in L.J.Eshelman (ed), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, pp.498-505, Morgan Kaufmann, 1995 P.M.Ross, D.Corne, H-L. Fang, ``Successful Lecture Timetabling with Evolutionary Algorithms'', in Applied Genetic and other Evolutionary Algorithms: Proceedings of the ECAI'94 Workshop , eds A.E.Eiben, B.Manderick, Zs.Ruttkay, Springer-Verlag, to appear in 1995. H.S.F.Fraser, R.Pugh, R.L.Kennedy, P.M.Ross, R.F.Harrison, ``A Comparison of Back propagation and Radial Basis Functions in the Diagnosis of Myocardial Infarction'', in Proceedings of the International Conference on Neural Networks and Expert Systems in Medicine and Healthcare, Plymouth, August 1994 Dave Corne, Peter Ross, H-L. Fang, ``Evolutionary Timetabling: Practice, Prospects and Work in Progress'', in Proceedings of UK Planning and Scheduling SIG Workshop, ed Patrick Prosser, Strathclyde, September '94. H-L Fang, P.M.Ross and D.Corne, ``A Promising Hybrid GA/Heuristic Approach for Open-Shop Scheduling Problems'', in Proceedings of ECAI 94: 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, A. Cohn (ed), pages 590--594, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 1994. (invited paper) P.M.Ross and Dave Corne, ``Applications of Genetic Algorithms'', in AISBQ, the quarterly journal of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, special issue on Evolutionary Computation, Winter 1994, edited by Terry Fogarty. P.M.Ross, D.Corne and H-L.Fang, ``Genetic Algorithms for Timetabling ad Scheduling Problems'', in Proceedings of Expert 94 Conference, ed. S.Stols, Pretoria, South Africa, October 1994 H-L Fang, P.M.Ross and D.Corne, ``A Promising Gentic Algorithm Approach to Job-Shop Scheduling, Rescheduling and Open-Shop Scheduling Problems'', in Proceedings of Fifth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, pp. 375-382, Morgan Kaufmann, 1993