Mariam Kiran

Dr. Mariam Kiran is a Research Fellow at the School of Computing, University of Leeds, currently working with Dr Karim Djemame and Dr. Ming Jiang on the OPTIMIS (Optimized Infrastructure Services) project. The high-level objective of OPTIMIS is to enable an open and dependable Cloud Service Ecosystem that delivers IT services that are adaptable, reliable, auditable and sustainable (ecological and economical). The key goal of the project is to allow organizations to automatically and seamlessly externalize services and applications, to trustworthy and auditable cloud providers. This ecosystem will give rise to a strengthened European ICT industry able to meet key societal and economical needs. The project is funded under the 'Software and Service Architectures & Infrastructures' track of the EU's FP7 framework program and started from June 2010.

Mariam graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2010 with a PhD in Coevolutionary Algorithms in agent based models particularly focusing on economic and social systems and how these can be made efficient on high performance computing. She has been working as a research associate at the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Sheffield from 2006-2010. During this time she has been involved in a number of projects like FLAME (Flexible Large Agent based Modelling Environment) for running on the Grid, EURACE (Modelling of the European Economy using Agents), EPITHELIOME (Modelling epithelial cells), Social Capital Modelling (Modelling social networks based on economic factors) and SPICE (MOD-funded project on modelling realistic crowds and malicious behaviour on Nvidia GPU cards). All of these projects involved working with Grid (HPC) and GPU computing in order to make the simulations run efficiently.

Her research interests lie in agent-based modelling, game theory, parallelisation, distributed computing, evolutionary computation, formal methods, socioeconomic and biology modelling and testing.