Mark A. O'Neill
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Mark A. O'Neill is an English biologist and computer scientist with interests in artificial intelligence, systems biology, complex systems and image analysis. He is the creator and lead programmer on a number of novel computational projects including the DAISY automated species identification system and PUPS P3 which is a organic computing environment for Linux.
Educated at The Kings School Grantham and at Sheffield, Cambridge and London Universities, his interests lie at the interface of biology and computing. He has worked in the areas of artificial life and biologically inspired computing. In particular, he has attempted to answer the question can one create software agents which are capable of carrying a useful computational payload which respond to their environment with the flexibility of a living organism and has also investigated how computational methods may be used to analyze biological and quasi biological systems, for example ecosystems and economies. He is also interested in ethology, especially the emergent social ecosystems which occur as a result of social networking on the internet.
His current projects include the use of artificial intelligence technques to look at complex socio-economic data and he continues to develop DAISY and to contribute to P3 and a number of other open source projects and is involved in the design of cluster/parallel computer hardware via Tumbling Dice Ltd.
Dr O'Neill has been a keen naturalist since childhood. In addition to his interests in complex systems and computer science he is fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and one of the countries leading authorities on the rearing and ecology of hawk moths. He is also interested in the use of so called smart field technology to monitor ecosystems and has been involved in projects looking at automatically tracking bumblebees using vision, and using both network analysis and remote sensing techniques to monitor the health of ecosystems. He has also had significant involvement in both computational neuroscience and systems biology. The former association resulting in many seminal papers while working at Oxford and the latter in the successful flotation of a systems biology company, e-Therapeutics PLC where Dr O'Neill was a senior scientist.
In addition to being a fellow of The Royal Entomological Society, Dr O'Neill is a fellow of the British Computer Society, The Institute of Engineering and Technology and The Royal Astronomical Society. He was also a recipient of the BCS Award for Computing in 1992.
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[edit] Projects
[edit] DAISY
DAISY] is an automated species identification system optimised for the rapid screening of invertebrates (e.g. insects) by non-experts (e.g. parataxonomists).
[edit] PUPS/P3
PUPS/P3 is an implementation of an organic computing environment for Linux which provides support for the implementation of low level persistent software agents.
[edit] ITG
ITG is a stereo correspondence/automated change detection algorithm based adaptive least squares correlation.
[edit] Selected publications
- Gaston K. J. and M. A. O'Neill. 2004. Automated species recognition: why not? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 359, 655–667.
- Hilgetag C.-C., M. A. O'Neill and M. P. Young. 1996. Indeterminacy of the Visual System. Science 271, 776-777.
- O'Neill M. A. and C.-C. Hilgetag 2001. The Portable UNIX Programming System [PUPS]: A computational environment for the dynamical representation and analysis of complex neurobiological data. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 356, 1259-1276.
- Watson A. T., M. A. O'Neill and I. J. Kitching. 2003. A qualitative study investigating automated identification of living macrolepidoptera using the Digital Automated Identification SYstem (DAISY). Systematics & Biodiversity, 1, 287-300.
