Deshen Moodley, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, will present the Department of Computer Science Colloquium with a talk entitled, "Agent based architectures for managing data, knowledge and system dynamism on the Sensor Web".

Sensor Web researchers are currently investigating middleware to aid in the dynamic discovery, integration and analysis of vast quantities of both high and low quality, but distributed and heterogeneous earth observation data. Key challenges being investigated include dynamic data integration and analysis, semantic interoperability, situation analysis and predictive analytics. Two emerging technologies that have shown promise in dealing with these issues are ontologies and software agents. This talk describes the Sensor Web Agent Platform (SWAP), an ontology driven agent based architecture for managing knowledge and system dynamism on the Sensor Web. It also describes an extension of the SWAP approach to dynamically integrate and analyse biodiversity data, specifically flower visiting data from South African natural history museums and then discusses some current and future projects towards developing architectures for autonomous, self-learning and knowledge generating systems.

Deshen Moodley is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). He is also the Research Manager of the South African Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR). His research interests are around the design and implementation of semantic architectures and frameworks to support event detection and analysis in complex systems, specifically to facilitate situation detection and prediction from semi structured and partial observations of a complex system. His research is carried out within the Adaptive and Cognitive Systems Lab at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the UKZN node of CAIR. Before embarking on an academic career he spent several years working in various companies in the UK, USA and South Africa. Most of his academic career was spent in the Department of Computer Science at UKZN where he also served a term as Head of School (2008-2011). This was permeated with a number of short research visits to other institutions including: the Clinical Decision Making Group, CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, the Machine Vision Unit, University of Edinburgh, UK  and the Sensor Web and Simulation Lab, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany.