Having lectured during the 1980s at CQU, Dr Dennis Jarvis has returned to familiar territory to take up his post as the Associate Professor in Computing for the Faculty of Business and Informatics, and is looking forward to the opportunity this position allows for pursuing his research interests. 

Before joining CQU, Dr Jarvis worked for CSIRO Manufacturing and Materials Technology for 15 years and then for a software company, Agent Oriented Software (AOS) for 6 years.

Dr Dennis Jarvis

At AOS, he developed agent-based applications for the defence, manufacturing and business sectors and conducted commissioned research for the UK Ministry of Defence, Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) and the United States Air Force.

The research activities were concerned primarily with the modelling of realistic individual (soldier, pilot, unmanned air vehicles) and team (platoon, company, air combat) behaviour using intelligent agents. These agents were then used to evaluate tactics in either closed simulations or in war-gaming environments.

Having had considerable success in using intelligent agent technology to provide entities in military war gaming environments with realistic and believable behaviours, Dr Jarvis is now keen to progress this work within the wider context of the computer games industry.

In this regard, he is looking forward to working with colleagues in the Faculty who have complementary expertise in computer graphics and machine learning.

Moving back to Rockhampton and taking up a lecturing position at CQU allows Dr Jarvis more flexibility to pursue a broader research agenda in the area of intelligent agents.

Not only does it mean that he can focus on the wider computer games industry, but it also means that he can pursue his interests in the modeling of team behaviour.

This includes both theoretical aspects (team cognition, team goals versus individual goals, team reasoning versus individual reasoning, human/agent teams etc) and practical aspects (methodology/software framework/application development).

It is his belief that the concept of team-oriented programming, in which computer-based systems are structured in terms of teams of performers that operate separately but in a concerted manner, will become increasingly important as the need to build larger and more complex systems continues.

Dr Jarvis is particularly keen to progress this concept through its application to domains other than defence, such as accounting, manufacturing, business, entertainment and health care.

In this regard, he is looking to work with both local industry and other researchers within the University.