Loughborough University is a top-ten rated university in England for research intensity (REF2014) and an outstanding 66% of the work of Loughborough’s academic staff who were eligible to be submitted to the REF was judged as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, compared to a national average figure of 43%. In choosing Loughborough for your research, you’ll work alongside academics who are leaders in their field. You will benefit from comprehensive support and guidance from our Doctoral College, including tailored careers advice, to help you succeed in your research and future career. You will work in the Vision, Autonomous and Human-Computer Systems research group where Dr Fatima and many others work on a variety of related projects in multi-agent systems, machine learning, robotics, and digital imaging, funded from a range of sources and with links to industrial partners. Collaboration with others, especially from other disciplines, will be encouraged. The Department of Computer Science is part of the School of Science, and has attracted staff and students from all over the world, making it a diverse and stimulating environment in which to study. Research ranges from underlying formal methods to the practical creation and operation of distributed autonomous systems. The Department has an international reputation for research with projects funded by government bodies such as EPSRC and EU, and industries such as BAE, Rolls Royce, and ARM. Further information may be found online. Many emerging applications of AI require interaction, cooperation, and coordination between machines. Within this context, this research is aimed at building multi-agent systems comprised of autonomous decision-making components. Each individual component must be designed to accomplish its own goals despite possible conflicts with the goals of others. Focus will be on modelling rational interaction and devising effective interaction mechanisms for enabling autonomous conflict resolution. The project will involve formal models from game theory together with machine learning, but the ultimate focus will be on real-world applications such as building a team of humans and manned/unmanned vehicles (UAVs), or a team of robots in which each robot must adapt its behaviour in accordance with the behaviours of the others. The research involves theoretical modelling as well as simulations.