I joined the Department of Information Science in September 2009. The previous year I was working at the university's Higher Education Development Centre, and before that was Associate Professor at RMIT University's School of Computer Science and IT.

Contacting Me:

• Email is preferred in the first instance - I generally respond to email promptly.
• Please use hod@infoscience.otago.ac.nz for anything HoD-related.
• Please email Gail to schedule a meeting with me. In general I'll be using afternoons for meetings and mornings for teaching preparation and research.
• If you need to contact me urgently (i.e. it can't wait for a few hours), then Stephen has my mobile number.
• Finally, if I have a "do not disturb" sign on my door, please respect it and do not interrupt. I need some time to prepare teaching materials and to do research. Thank you!

In 2012 I am involved in BSNS106 ("Information and Communication in Organisations", our big core first year paper), and am coordinating SENG407.

In 2010 and 2011 I was involved in the following papers: BSNS106, COMP111, TELE303, and SENG407 (password protected wiki).

I spent September 2008-August 2009 working with Educational Media at the Higher Education Development Centre of the University of Otago, looking at applications of technology in teaching and learning.

The overall aim of my research is to find better ways of creating software. I am interested in (agent oriented) software engineering, programming languages, and logic and formal methods.

Over the past decade I have focussed on software that is conceptualised in terms of "intelligent agents" which are able to exhibit robust and flexible behaviour. This approach has attracted interest since it is able to operate successfully in environments that are failure prone and highly dynamic. There are a number of successful applications, and a number of companies that specialise in this area.

My work, which mostly falls within the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, has made significant contributions in a number of areas:

• Concepts for designing agent software including the crucial role that is played by goals and how (and why) they should be explicitly represented in agent systems.
• Design methodologies for agent-based systems, in particular the Prometheus methodology.
• Techniques for designing and implementing flexible and robust interactions between agents, including both goal-based techniques and techniques based on commitment machines.
• Techniques for debugging and for software maintenance of agent systems.
• Agent-oriented programming languages.
• Applying social expectations to monitoring interactions (which can be software-software, software-humans, or computer-mediated human-human interaction).

I am a member of SECML here at the University of Otago, and a former member of the RMIT Agent group. My Erdös number is 3.

Recent publications:

2012

• Beatriz López, Aditya Ghose, Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Mariusz Nowostawski, Michael Winikoff, and Stephen Cranefield. Energy-Aware Optimisation of Business Processes (Extended Abstract), poster at the Third international workshop on Agent Technologies for Energy Systems (ATES 2012), held at AAMAS 2012.
• Akin Gunay, Michael Winikoff and Pinar Yolum. Commitment Protocol Generation. 10th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT), held at AAMAS 2012.
• Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies IX: 9th International Workshop, DALT 2011, Taipei, Taiwan, May 3, 2011, Revised Selected and Invited Papers. Editted by C. Sakama, S. Sardina, W. Vasconcelos, M. Winikoff. Springer,LNCS 7169.
• Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems: 13th International Conference, PRIMA 2010, Kolkata, India, November 2010, Revised Selected Papers. Editted by Nirmit Desai, Alan Liu, Michael Winikoff. Springer, LNAI 7057.
• Michael Winikoff, Nirmit Desai, Alan Liu. Introduction to special issue on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. Multiagent and Grid Systems (an international journal), accepted (to appear).
• Hoa Khanh Dam and Michael Winikoff. Towards a next-generation AOSE methodology. Science of Computer Programming, Elsevier (Accepted, still to appear)
• Minjie Hu, Michael Winikoff, Stephen Cranefield. Teaching Novice Programming Using Goals and Plans in a Visual Notation. Fourteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2012), part of the Australasian Computer Science Week 2012.

2011

• Swee-Kin Loke, Mark Lokman, Michael Winikoff, Jenny McDonald, Rob Wass, Maryam Purvis, Richard Zeng, Christoph Matthaei, & Peter Vlugter. Sustainable Mobile Learning: Experiences in a Zoology paper. Abstract to be presented at the 2011 Spotlight on Teaching and Learning, Otago University.
• Michael Winikoff, Hanno-Felix Wagner, Thomas Young, Stephen Cranefield, Roger Jarquin, Guannan Li, Brent Martin, and Rainer Unland. Agent-Based Container Terminal Optimisation. Accepted to Ninth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies (MATES), 2011.
• Stephen Cranefield, Michael Winikoff, Wamberto Vasconcelos. Modelling and monitoring interdependent expectations. 12th International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems (COIN), held at AAMAS 2011.
• Michael Winikoff. An Integrated Formal Framework for Reasoning about Goal Interactions. 9th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2011), held at AAMAS 2011. revised version is in the post-proceedings of DALT.
• Mehdi Dastani, M. Birna van Riemsdijk, Michael Winikoff. Rich Goal Types in Agent Programming [PDF]. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011)
• Michael Winikoff, Stephen Cranefield, Roger Jarquin, Guannan Li, Brent Martin, Rainer Unland, Hanno-Felix Wagner, Thomas Young. Agent-Based Container Terminal Optimisation(extended abstract) [PDF]. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011). A full version of this paper was accepted to MATES 2011.
• Michael Winikoff. A Formal Framework for Reasoning about Goal Interactions (extended abstract) [PDF]. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011). A full version of this paper was accepted to DALT 2011.
• Hoa Khanh Dam and Michael Winikoff. An agent-oriented approach to change propagation in software maintenance. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, volume 23, issue 3 (2011), pages 384-452. doi:10.1007/s10458-010-9163-0
• Swee-Kin Loke, June Tordoff, Michael Winikoff, Jenny McDonald, Peter Vlugter, and Stephen Duffull. SimPharm: how pharmacy students made meaning of a clinical case differently in paper- and simulation-based workshops. British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET), 42(5), 865-874. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01113.x (Note: this paper was accepted, and appeared online, in 2010)

You can also find a full list of my publications.  

I am Head of Department of the department of Information Science. I also represent the division of commerce on the university's Information Technology Advisory Committee (ITAC).

From September 2010 - February 2011 I was Associate Dean (Postgraduate) in the School of Business, and, in this capacity, chair of the School's Postgraduate Advisory Group, and member of various committees.

I have written a range of software including W-Prolog, Lygon, auml.pl, SmartGuide, and a range of palm pilot software including Karel the robot

I used to maintain a list of alternatives to C for programming PalmPilots but with fatherhood I've had less time for "geek toys" ...

"I would teach children music, physics and philosophy; but more importantly music, for in the patterns of music and the arts are the keys to learning." (Plato)

I am a keen musician: I play piano, sing in choirs, sometimes conduct choirs, and have been known to compose on occasion.