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The School of Computer Science is delighted to congratulate Nicola McDonnell on successfully defending her PhD thesis yesterday afternoon. 

Nicola was supervised by Prof. Jim Duggan and Dr Enda Howley. Her thesis is entitled “Leveraging Nature-inspired Techniques to Semi-automate the Design of Multi-agent Systems”, and proposed a range of evolutionary computing and reinforcement learning algorithms for developing communications protocols for multi-agent systems, with applications in the highly topical area of optimising resource usage in cloud computing centres.

We are very grateful to the external examiner, Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Full Professor in the University of Geneva (201-250 World Rankings) and Director of U. Geneva’s Interfaculty Research Centre in Informatics, whose expertise is in self-organising and emergent systems, and founder of the journal ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems. We are also grateful to the internal examiner, Dr Enda Barrett of the School of Computer Science here in University of Galway. Head of School, Prof. Michael Madden chaired the viva. 

Of course, well done also to Jim and Enda as the supervisors.