Dr Joshua Knowles - further information

Joshua Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in the Machine Learning and Optimization Group, School of Computer Science. His main research interests are evolutionary computation, heuristics for combinatorial optimization, multi-objective optimization, and computational biology. Industrial research projects and collaborations to date have included work with BT, Astra Zeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Combimatrix and Theo Chocolate.

Following a PhD completed in 2001, Joshua was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Free University of Brussels from  2001-3, where he worked in the AI lab, IRIDIA. He was awarded BBSRC's flagship David Phillips Fellowship in 2003, giving him 5 years of funded research in the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre. From there he moved to the School of Computer Science in 2006 to take up a concurrent Career Development Fellowship. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2011.

Joshua has written about 80 publications in twelve years of active research, including 30 journal articles. He is best known within his field for work on the PAES and ParEGO algorithms, contributions to the performance assessment of multiobjective optimizers (with David Corne and, separately, Eckart Zitzler and Lothar Thiele) and research on data clustering with Julia Handl. Fifteen of his papers have more than 100 citations.

Current research directions stem from collaborations with bio-science researchers in MIB, or formerly there, notably Douglas Kell and William Rowe. These include the automated computer control and closed-loop optimization of experiments in 'omics data capture and systems biology. Most recently, these studies have pioneered a method to evolve real strands of DNA on custom chip arrays to selectively bind proteins (aptamer evolution).

In separate work with his PhD student, Richard Allmendinger, Joshua is trying to understand and control the effects of dynamic and time-linkage constraints that frequently occur in closed-loop optimization. And research with Julia Handl has successfully applied evolutionary and multiobjective optimization methods to protein structure prediction.

Joshua undertakes a number of responsible positions in the research community. He is a member of the UK EPSRC Research College, a leading grant-funding body. He is an associate editor of the Swarm Intelligence journal and an editorial board member of Evolutionary Computation journal. He is on the Steering Committee of the International Conference of Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization (EMO).

In 2005, Joshua won (jointly with co-author David Corne) the "Outstanding IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Paper Award" of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for his 2003 article on online algorithms for archiving of multi-criterion vectors. He won the same prize in 2008 for his 2006 paper on the ParEGO algorithm.