# UCD Linked Agents and Intelligence Research Group

> Engineering intelligent, autonomous and multi-agent systems

School of Computer Science, University College Dublin

We study how to design, program and deploy autonomous software agents and the multi-agent systems they form, from agent-oriented programming languages and platforms to hypermedia environments and the integration of large language models into agentic architectures.

## Research themes

- **[Agent-Oriented Programming & Multi-Agent Systems](research/multi-agent-systems.md)**: Languages, platforms and engineering methods for building rational agents and the multi-agent systems they form, including the ASTRA programming language.
- **[Hypermedia & Web-based Agents](research/hypermedia-mas.md)**: Agents that inhabit the Web, discovering and acting on resources through hypermedia and the Web of Things.
- **[Agentic AI & Language Models](research/llm-agents.md)**: Combining large language models with structured agent architectures to build dependable agentic systems.
- **[Social Simulation & Machine Ethics](research/social-simulation-ethics.md)**: Agent-based models of individual and collective decision-making, and of ethical behaviour in autonomous machines.

## People

- [Rem Collier](people/rem-collier.md), Associate Professor · Group Co-Director: Agent-oriented programming languages and multi-agent systems
- [Vivek Nallur](people/vivek-nallur.md), Assistant Professor · Group Co-Director: Multi-agent modelling, social simulation and machine ethics
- [Hao Mu](people/hao-mu.md), PhD Student (thesis: Agentic Software Engineering)
- [Mahjabin Siddique](people/mahjabin-siddique.md), PhD Student (thesis: Enhancing Microservice Architectures through Enterprise Knowledge)
- [Md Asif Iqbal Fahim](people/md-asif-iqbal-fahim.md), PhD Student (thesis: Dynamic Integration Variability)
- [Dimitrios Kyriakidis](people/dimitrios-kyriakidis.md), MSc Student (thesis: Implementing Generative Resources Layers for BDI Agent Systems)

## News

- 2026-10-09: The updated [ASTRA user guide](https://guide.astralanguage.com/en/latest/) is now available, with documentation for ASTRA 2.1.0.
- 2026-10-08: ASTRA 2.1.0 has been released. Since 2.0.13, this release fixes encapsulated goal completion and failure handling, corrects arithmetic and logical operator evaluation, restores delivery of message parameters, and improves unit testing so compilation errors and failing tests fail Maven builds. It also adds the FIPA performatives propagate and proxy. Find the [ASTRA artifacts on Maven Central](https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/com/astralanguage/) (including [astra-core 2.1.0](https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/com.astralanguage/astra-core/2.1.0)), browse the [release-2.1.0 source tag](https://gitlab.com/astra-language/astra-core/-/tree/release-2.1.0), and read the [release notes and upgrade guidance](https://gitlab.com/astra-language/astra-core/-/blob/release-2.1.0/RELEASE_NOTES.md). Some fixes change existing program behaviour; review the upgrade guidance before updating.
- 2026-09-28: The UCD Linked Agents and Intelligence Research Group (LAIR) website is now live.

## Contact

School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

Email: rem.collier@ucd.ie

- [UCD School of Computer Science](https://www.ucd.ie/cs/)
- [University College Dublin](https://www.ucd.ie/)
- [Find a UCD Researcher](https://people.ucd.ie/)

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HTML version: ../index.html  
Site index for LLMs: ../llms.txt