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Ontario Tech acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation.

We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

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Peter Lewis profile picture

Peter Lewis
PhD

Canada Research Chair in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence

Associate Professor

Computer Science
Faculty of Business and Information Technology

Dr. Lewis’s research advances both foundational and applied aspects of trustworthy, reflective, and socially intelligent systems. Drawing on extensive experience applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) commercially, he is interested in where AI meets society, and how to help that relationship work well. Dr. Lewis is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Contact expert

peter.lewis@ontariotechu.ca
905.721.8668 ext. 3577

petelewis.com/

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Areas of expertise


  • PhD Computer Science University of Birmingham, UK 2010
  • MSc Natural Computation University of Birmingham, UK. 2006
  • BSc Computer Science University of Leicester, UK 2001
  • Building Trustworthy Intelligent Machines . Invited talk at the INTROMAT (Introducing Personalized Treatment Of Mental Health Problems using Adaptive Technology) Project Scientific Advisory Council, Bergen, Norway. September 2019.
  • What’s It Like To Trust A Rock? Invited keynote talk at the Workshop on Evolution of Human Behaviour, at the 2019 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE), Newcastle, UK. July 2019.
  • Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems And A Case for Socially Self-Aware Machines. Invited keynote talk at the 7th edition of the Workshop Series on Autonomously Learning and Optimising Systems (SAOS), at the 32nd International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS). Copenhagen, Denmark. May 2019.
  • Towards Socially Self-Aware Machines. Invited talk at the SAINT Workshop on Self-aware and Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China. May 2019.
  • Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems And A Case for Socially Self-Aware Machines. Invited talk at the School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University. Edinburgh, Scotland. January 2019.
  • Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems And A Case for Socially Self-Aware Machines. Invited talk at Institute of Computer Technology, Vienna University of Technology. Vienna, Austria. October 2018.
  • Self-aware Computing Systems: From Psychology to Engineering. Invited plenary talk at the 9th IEEE International Conference on Awareness Science & Technology (iCAST) 2018. Fukuoka, Japan. September 2018.
  • Co-creating Enduring Institutions for Socio-Technical Systems: The Complementarity of Agent-based and Evolutionary Modelling Approaches. Invited talk at the Joint Workshop on Self-Aware Computing and Models at Runtime. Trento, Italy. September 2018.
  • Co-creating Enduring Institutions for Socio-Technical Systems: The Complementarity of Agent-based and Evolutionary Modelling Approaches. Invited CS Seminar Talk at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. July 2018.
  • Thinking Beyond Data. Invited plenary talk at the CompTIA UK Community Meeting. June 2018.
  • Self-aware Computing Systems: From Psychology to Engineering. Invited opening talk at the “Hot Topics Special Track on Self-aware Systems” at Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) 2017. Lausanne, Switzerland. March 2017.
  • Self-aware Computing Systems: From Psychology to Engineering. Invited Computer Science Research Seminar at Exeter University. December 2016.
  • Types of Computational Self-awareness and How We Might Implement Them. Invited talk given at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh USA. September 2016.
  • Types of Computational Self-awareness and How We Might Implement Them. Invited opening talk given at ES Week 2016 Special Session, “I am a Chip, Therefore: Can I Think? – The Dawn of Self-Awareness in Cyber-Physical Systems”. Pittsburgh, USA. September 2016.
  • Types of Computational Self-awareness and How We Might Implement Them. Invited Computing Seminar Series talk given at Keele University. March 2015.
  • Types of Computational Self-awareness. Invited talk given at the Dagstuhl seminar on “Model-driven algorithms and architectures for self-aware computing systems”. Dagstuhl, Germany. January 2015.
  • Heterogeneity and Diversity in Collective Systems. Invited talk given at the Dagstuhl seminar on “Collective Adaptive Systems: Qualitative and Quantitative Modelling and Analysis”. Dagstuhl, Germany. December 2014.
  • Types of Computational Self-awareness and How We Might Implement Them. Invited lecture given at the Second Awareness Summer School in Lucca, organised by the EC FP7 Awareness initiative. Italy. June 2013.
  • An Outlook for Self-awareness in Computing Systems. Invited talk at the Department of Electronics, Informatics and Bioengineering at the Politecnico Di Milano, Italy. Supported by a Research Exchange grant from the Awareness Project. March 2013.
  • Engineering Self-aware Computing Systems. Invited Computer Science colloquium talk at the University of Paderborn, Germany. November 2012.
  • An Outlook for Self-awareness in Computing Systems. Invited talk at the Workshop on Self-Awareness in Reconfigurable Computing Systems (SRCS), at Field Programmable Logic (FPL), Oslo, Norway. September 2012.
  • Engineering Self-aware and Self-expressive Systems. Invited Informatics Department colloquium talk at King’s College London. February 2012.
  • Building Confidence in Self-aware, Self-expressive Systems. Invited talk given at the EU Awareness workshop, in Bologna. January 2012.
  • Game Theory: From Economics to Biology to Computer Science... And Back Again. Invited talk given at the Centre for Systems Biology, University of Birmingham, UK. November 2009.
  • Evolutionary Market Agents for Resource Allocation in Decentralised Systems. Invited talk given at the Broadband Applications Research Centre, BT PLC. August 2008.

Selected Edited Books & Volumes:
- Peter R. Lewis, Marco Platzner, Bernhard Rinner, Jim Torresen, and Xin Yao, editors. Self-Aware Computing Systems: An Engineering Approach. Springer, 2016.

- Nurit Gal-Oz and Peter R. Lewis, editors. Trust Management XII, volume 528 of IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Springer, 2018.

- Peter R. Lewis, Steve Battle, Panagiotis Ritsos, and Christopher J. Headleand, editors. Artificial Life and Intelligent Agents, volume 732 of Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer, 2018.

Selected Publications:
- Chloe M. Barnes, Abida Ghouri, and Peter R. Lewis. Explaining evolutionary agent-based models via principled simplification. Artificial Life, 27(3), 2021.

- Chloe M. Barnes, Anikó Ekárt, and Peter R. Lewis. Beyond goal-rationality: Traditional action can reduce volatility in socially situated agents. Future Generation Computer Systems, 113:579–596, 2020.

- Aamir Akbar, Peter R. Lewis, and Elizabeth Wanner. A self-aware and scalable solution for efficient mobile-cloud hybrid robotics. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7:1–20, 2020.

- Stephen Marsh, Tosan Atele-Williams, Anirban Basu, Natasha Dwyer, Peter R. Lewis, Hector Miller-Bakewell, and Jeremy Pitt. Thinking about trust: People, process, and place. Patterns, 1:1–8, 2020.

- Lukas Esterle and Peter R. Lewis. Distributed autonomy and trade-offs in online multiobject k-coverage. Computational Intelligence, 36(2):720–742, 2020.

- Kirstie Bellman, Nikil Dutt, Lukas Esterle, Andreas Herkersdorf, Axel Jantsch, Christopher Landauer, Peter R. Lewis, Marco Platzner, Nima TaheriNejad, and Kalle Tammemäe. Self-aware cyber-physical systems. ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, In Press, 2020.

- Darren M. Chitty, Rakhi Parmar, and Peter R. Lewis. Improving urban air quality through long-term optimisation of vehicle fleets. In Intelligent Systems and Applications: Proceedings of the 2019 Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys), vol. 2, pages 70–89. Springer, 2019.

- David Burth Kurka, Jeremy Pitt, Peter R. Lewis, Alina Patelli, and Anikó Ekárt. Disobedience as a mechanism of change. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Self-adaptive and Self-organising Systems, pages 1–10, 2018.

- Peter Andras, Lukas Esterle, Michael Guckert, The Anh Han, Peter R. Lewis, Kristina Milanovic, Terry Payne, Cedric Perret, Jeremy Pitt, Simon T. Powers, Neil Urquhart, and Simon Wells. Trusting intelligent machines. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 37, 2018.

- Aamir Akbar and Peter R. Lewis. The importance of granularity in multi-objective optimization of mobile-cloud hybrid apps. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 0(0):e3526, 2018. Obtained significant global press coverage.

- Simon T. Powers, Anikó Ekárt, and Peter R. Lewis. Modelling enduring institutions: The complementarity of evolutionary and agent-based approaches. Cognitive Systems Research, 52:67–81, 2018.

- Samuel Kounev, Peter Lewis, Kirstie Bellman, Nelly Bencomo, Javier Camara, Ada Diaconescu, Lukas Esterle, Kurt Geihs, Holger Giese, Sebastian Götz, Paola Inverardi, Jeffrey Kephart, and Andrea Zisman. The notion of self-aware computing. In Samuel Kounev, Jeffrey O. Kephart, Aleksandar Milenkoski, and Xiaoyun Zhu, editors, Self-Aware Computing Systems, pages 3–16. Springer, 2017.

- Peter R. Lewis. Self-aware computing systems: From psychology to engineering. In Proceedings of the 2017 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), pages 1044–1049, 2017.

- Peter R. Lewis, Arjun Chandra, Funmilade Faniyi, Kyrre Glette, Tao Chen, Rami Bahsoon, Jim Torresen, and Xin Yao. 
Architectural aspects of self-aware and self-expressive computing systems. IEEE Computer, 48:62–70, 2015.

- Peter R. Lewis, Lukas Esterle, Arjun Chandra, Bernhard Rinner, and Xin Yao. Static, dynamic and adaptive heterogeneity in distributed smart camera networks. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), 10, 2015.

- Lukas Esterle, Peter R. Lewis, Xin Yao, and Bernhard Rinner. Socio-economic vision graph generation and handover in distributed smart camera networks. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 10(2):20, 2014.

- Harry Goldingay and Peter R. Lewis. A taxonomy of heterogeneity and dynamics in particle swarm optimisation. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8672 / 2014 “Parallel Problem Solving from Nature - PPSN XIII”, pages 171–180. Springer, 2014.

- Kristof Van Moffaert, Tim Brys, Arjun Chandra, Lukas Esterle, Peter R. Lewis, and Ann Nowé. A novel adaptive weight selection algorithm for multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pages 2306–2314. IEEE Press, 2014.

- Haobo Fu, Peter R. Lewis, Bernhard Sendhoff, Ke Tang, and Xin Yao. What are dynamic optimization problems? In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), pages 1550–1557. IEEE Press, 2014.

- Peter R. Lewis, Paul Marrow, and Xin Yao. Resource allocation in decentralised computational systems: An evolutionary market based approach. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 21(2):143–171, 2010.

A full publication list is available on Dr. Lewis' website.

  • Aston Achievement Award for Outstanding Business Engagement and Innovation, 2020.
  • Best Paper Award, 12th IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, 2018.
  • BT Gordon Radley Award for Best Author of Innovation (runner up), 2010.
  • Associate Professor, Ontario Tech University
  • Visiting Academic at Aston University, Birmingham, UK
  • Associate Editor, IEEE Technology & Society Magazine
  • Steering Committee member, IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS)