Sherief Abdallah

Picture of me

Associate Professor

Head of Programme
Faculty of Engineering & IT, British University in Dubai, Dubai International Academic City, United Arab Emirates

Honorary Fellow
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK

Email: email
Tel: +971 4 367 1964
Fax: +971 4 366 4698

About me

I finished my MS/PhD in 2006 from University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA) under the supervision of Professor Victor Lesser. I am currently an Associate Professor at the British University in Dubai and an Honorary Fellow at University of Edinburgh, UK.

Research Interests

I am passionate about developing scalable adaptive systems that automatically improve their performance. I am particularly interested in studying networks of agents and developing distributed learning algorithms that allow these agents to cooperate optimize the structure of the network of (concurrently) learning agents.

An orthogonal direction to optimizing performance in agent networks is to develop a framework for reigourous experimental analysis, which expose to researchers the underlying dynamics of such complex networks. In particular, I am investigating the use of social network analysis techniques to understand the dynamics of learning over netorks.

I am also interested in applying the techniques I have devloped in realistic settings that span over interdisciplinary areas, including atmospheric studies, e-commerce, information retrieval, mobile devices, sensor nets, and network management.

Please refer to my research statement for more details CV.

If you are interested in pursuing PhD in University of Edinburgh while residing in Dubai, please send me an email.

Software

Distributed task allocation simulator.

Teaching

Knowledge Representation: Fall 2009
Learning from Data (Machine Learning): Fall 2006, Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Summer 2011
Data mining: Spring 2007, Spring 2008, Spring 2009, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012
Research Methods: Fall 2010, Fall 2011
IT Project Management (co-taught): Fall 2011

Publications

To appear

S. D'Souza, Y. Gal, P. Pasquier, S. Abdallah, and I. Rahwan. Reasoning about Goal Revelation in Human Negotiation. IEEE Intelligent Systems.
Abdallah, S., Kaisers, M. Addressing the Policy-bias of Q-learning by Repeating Updates. In the proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS

2012

Abdallah, S., Shaalan, K., Shoaib, M., Integrating Rule-based System with Classification for Arabic Named Entity Recognition, In the Proceedings of The 13th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing), March 11–17, New Delhi, India, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012.
S. Abdallah. Using a hierarchy of coordinators to overcome the frontier effect in social learning. in the proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS, extended abstract).

2011

S. Abdallah. A New Methodology for Generalizing Unweighted Network Measures (in press). Social Network Analysis and Mining. Published by Springer.
M. Rayess and S. Abdallah. Visualizing Learning Dynamics in Large-Scale Networks. 18th RCRA International Workshop, IJCAI 2011.
S. Abdallah and H. Musa. Comparing Generalizations of Unweighted Network Measures. Mining and Learning with Graphs Workshop, KDD 2011.

2010

S. Abdallah. Using Graph Analysis to Study Networks of Adaptive Agent. In: Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) (acceptance rate 22%)
C. Zhang, S. Abdallah, and V. Lesser (2010). Self-Organization for Coordinating Decentralized Reinforcement Learning. In: Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) (acceptance rate 22%)
I. Rahwan, M. I. Madakkatel, J. F. Bonnefon, R. N. Awan and S. Abdallah (2010). Behavioural Experiments for Assessing the Abstract Argumentation Semantics of Reinstatement. Cognitive Science. Volume 34, Issue 8, pages 1483-1502.
I. Rahwan, B. Banihashemi, C. Reed, D. Walton and S. Abdallah (2010). Representing and Classifying Arguments on the Semantic Web. The Knowledge Engineering Review.
I. Rahwan, Fatemeh Jahedpari, Sherief Abdallah (2010). The Dynamics of Two Cognitive Heuristics for Coordination on Networks. SocialCom, 473-479

2009

S. Abdallah Generalizing Unweighted Network Measures Using the Effective Cardinality. Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis (SNA), International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2009 (acceptance rate 29%)
Chongjie Zhang, Sherief Abdallah, and Victor Lesser (2009). Integrating Organizational Control into Multi-Agent Learning. In: Proceedings of 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) (to appear) (acceptance rate 22%)
A. Alshamsi, S. Abdallah and I. Rahwan (2009). Multiagent Self-Organization for a Taxi Dispatch System. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) (to appear).
Y. Gal, S. D'souza, P. Pasquier, I. Rahwan and S. Abdallah (2009). The Effects of Goal Revelation on Computer-Mediated Negotiation. In: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

2008

S. Abdallah and V. Lesser (2008) A Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Algorithm with Non-linear Dynamics". Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume 33, pages 521-549.
Sherief Abdallah and Victor Lesser (2008). Non-linear Dynamics in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms. In: Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). Estoril, Portugal. (acceptance rate 37%)
Chongjie Zhang, Sherief Abdallah, and Victor Lesser (2008). Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning through Automated Supervision. In: Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). Estoril, Portugal. (acceptance rate 37%)

2007

S. Abdallah and V. Lesser. Multiagent Reinforcement Learning and Self-organization in a Network of Agents. In Proceedings of 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, AAMAS, 2007 (acceptance rate 22%) Runnerup for "Best Paper Award".
S. Abdallah and V. Lesser. Distributed Learning and Self-organization in a Random Networks. 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, AAMAS, 2007

2006

S. Abdallah and V. Lesser. Learning the Task Allocation Game. In Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS, 2006 (acceptance rate 24%).

2005

XiaoQin Zhang, Victor Lesser, Sherief Abdallah. Efficient Management of Multi-Linked Negotiation Based on a Formalized Model. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Volume 10, Number 2, March 2005.
S. Abdallah and V. Lesser. Modeling Task Allocation Using a Decision Theoretic Model. In Proceedings of 4th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS, 2005 (acceptance rate 24%).
J. Ostwald, V. Lesser, and S. Abdallah. Combinatorial Auctions for Resource Allocation in a Distributed Sensor Network. In proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium, (RTSS'05), IEEE Computer Society Press. December 2005 (acceptance rate 21%).
S. Abdallah and V. Lesser. Learning Task Allocation via Multi-Level Policy Gradient Algorithm with Dynamic Learning Rate. Workshop on Planning and Learning in A Priori Unknown or Dynamic Domains, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2005.
M. Zink, D. Westbrook, S. Abdallah, et al. Meteorological Command and Control: An End-to-end Architecture for a Hazardous Weather Detection Sensor Network. Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on End-to-End, Sense-and-Respond Systems, Applications, and Services (EESR 05), pp. 37-42. June 2005.
S. Abdallah and Victor Lesser. Learning Scalable Coalition Formation in an Organizational Context. Book chapter in "Challenges in the Coordination of Large Scale Multiagent Systems", published by Springer. 2005

2004

S. Abdallah and V. Lesser. Organization-Based Cooperative Coaltion Formation. In Proceedings of Intelligent Agent Technology, IAT, 2004 (acceptance rate 16%).
S. Abdallah, H. Zhang, and V. Lesser. The Role of an Agent Organization in a Grid Computing Environment. In Proceedings of ICAPS'04 workshop on planning and scheduling for web and grid services, June 2004.

2003

XQ Zhang; V. Lesser; and S. Abdallah. Efficient Ordering and Parameterization of Multi-Linked Negotiation. In Proceedings 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. (Extended abstract), July, 2003. Full version available as UMASS Computer Science Tech. Report #02-42.

2002

S. Abdallah and et al. Monitoring and Synchronization for Teamwork (or .pdf). In Proceedings of 17th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (the Special Track of Coordination Models, Languages and Applications). March, 2002 (acceptance rate 42%).

Useful links

www.akhbarak.net : a website integrating news about Egypt.
www.i-dar.net : a website for searching real estate, rent or sale, in Dubai. Has couple of interesting statistics.