Resume (PDF) - RMIT University

John Thangarajah
john.thangarajah@gmail.com
SUMMARY
My passion is in innovation and leadership.
I am an active researcher in the field of Intelligent Agent Systems. My interests are in Agent
Oriented Software Development (how do we build and construct Intelligent Systems), Agent
Reasoning (how can programs behave in smart ways) and more recently in Intelligent
Conversation Systems (how can systems interact intelligently satisfying a user’s information
needs).
I collaborate with industry partners and researchers both local and international. I have many
publications at highly ranked venues with close to 600 citations. I am a Chief Investigator on
3 ARC funded grants. I have managed research projects as well as software and have served
on many organizing committees. I outline some of these leadership roles briefly in this CV.
I have over 10+ years experience in teaching IT related courses to undergraduate,
postgraduate and industry personnel. In particular, in Java, C, C++, Computing Theory,
Agent Oriented Programming and Intelligent Agents.
My goal is to continue to be involved in developing smart systems that are not only
intellectually challenging but also have practical benefit and impact.
WORK EXPERIENCE
2005 – Present RMIT University, Melbourne
Senior Lecturer/ Senior Research Fellow (Intelligent Systems Group) (2009- )
Lecturer/Research Fellow (Intelligent Systems Group) (2005-2009)
Teaching: I have taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Java, C, Intelligent
Agents and Agent Programming. This includes delivering lectures, preparing lecture material,
lab/tutorial material and all forms of assessment.
Research: I am an active researcher, some of my present and past research topics include:
- Developing a methodology and tool for designing multi agent systems. The tool, that I’ve
managed the development of, won an award at an international conference in 2005.
- Testing Agent based systems. Developing approaches to test Agent Systems borrowing from
traditional approaches such as model-based testing and unit testing.
- Goal based reasoning: how can goals be represented, how can conflicts be recognized and
managed, how can goals be aborted, suspended and resumed, and how can goals be prioritized.
Also reasoning about the different types of goals.
- Intention selection. An agent typically pursues multiple tasks concurrently; this project
investigates mechanisms for deciding which intention to progress next.
- Developing intelligent conversation systems. One of my projects in this area won the 2011
Telstra innovation challenge. I featured on the front page of “The Australian” newspaper IT
section on the 24/01/2012.
- Investigating techniques for community based rare-information search.
Collaboration: I have much ongoing collaboration with International Research Partners:
- University of Autonoma (Spain) on developing a methodology for building Electronic (E-)
Institutions.
- Stanford Research Institute International (USA) on reasoning about goals and plans.

- Investigating the design of open agent organizations which is collaborative work with the
University of Utrecht (Netherlands).
and also with Industry Partners:
- Developing the architecture for an Intelligent Companion Toy for children with RealThing Pvt.
Ltd., which is a joint industry/ARC funded project.
- Provided consultancy to Agent Oriented Software assisting them in developing their new stateof-the-art
Agent programming language suitable for UAVs. My knowledge and experience with
BDI Agent Systems was essential in this project. I have also been involved in many other projects
with Agent Oriented Software.
- Was involved in developing a weather alert system with the Bureau of Meteorology in 2005,
which was also a joint industry/ARC funded project.
Higher Degrees by Research Coordinator from 2008-2010: Duties included, processing PhD and
Masters by research student and scholarship applications, providing mentoring support for research
students, ensuring a good research culture is maintained, responsible for a number of administrative
issues, and represent the School at the college HDR committee.
Marketing: In the last 2 years I have undertaken a Marketing and Promotions role for the
school of Computer Science and have attended local and international (SriLanka, Malaysia)
exhibitions and educational fairs as well as visiting agents to meet with prospective students.
Project Manager: Continuing the development of a commercial quality agent design tool
(called PDT). The application is Java based developed within Eclipse. I am actively involved
in the design of the system and oversee the development.
Chief Investigator: on three ARC funded grants (750K total) and responsible for the
progress on certain aspects of each grant.
2012 Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Computer Science program. Provide
guidance to students, oversee course offerings, manage at risk students, provide input to the
course offerings and course structures in the program.
Supervision: I am supervising several PhD, masters, honors and project students, and have
had one PhD and one Masters by Research completions.
Acting group leader: In the past year I have been acting group leader of the Intelligent
Systems group on several occasions. I have also mentored several members within the group.
2000 January – 2004 December RMIT University, Melbourne
Lecturer (Advanced Programming Concepts in Java)
Duties included delivering lectures, preparing lecture notes, assignments, tutorial exercises,
lab activities and the final examination, and coordinating tutors.
2004 RMIT University, Melbourne
Online Instructor
Instructor for Web programming and C programming. Duties included preparing and
grading assignments and final examination, answering student queries via email and the
online student forum. This role provided me with the knowledge and experience of
delivering courses via distance.

2002 November – February 2003 RMIT University, Melbourne
Lecturer (Short Course in OO Programming for Ericsson Group)
I was employed to run two special short courses of six weeks for employees of the Ericsson
R&D group. There were approximately 40 students in each class. The aim of this course was
to introduce the concept of Object Oriented Programming using Java. Duties included
preparation and delivery of lecture material, tutorials and lab activities, as well as preparing
the final examination. I attained very positive feedback from those Ericsson employees.
2002 March - 2002 June Agentis International/RMIT University, Melbourne
Research Fellow (Simplifying Agent Concepts Project)
Worked on a joint ARC funded project implementing and evaluating the benefits and costs
of resource conflict management in BDI style of agents. This work required an in depth
knowledge of BDI systems and also the framework for managing resource conflicts that I
had developed as part of my PhD thesis. This work required a high level of programming
skills in both Java and JACK which was the chosen implementation platform.
2000 December – 2001 March RMIT University, Melbourne
Team Leader: Robocup Rescue Simulation Project
Team leader of the Robocup Rescue project at RMIT, which included supervising a group of
three students and participating in the design and development of the application. Robocup
Rescue is a research project with the aim of promoting research in multi-agent systems,
which deal with issues of disaster management and recovery. This work focused particularly
on investigation of co-operation between heterogeneous agents, possibly built by different
groups.
2000 September Agent Oriented Software Pvt Ltd., Carlton, Melbourne
Coursework preparation
Developed material for a JACK agent language training workshop that was presented by Dr.
Ralph Ronnquist on behalf of AOS to its clients. JACK is a state of the art intelligent agent
development toolkit developed by AOS. Among the material prepared were lecture slides,
tutorial exercises, sample programs and documentation support.
1999 December – 2000 February CSIRO, Carlton, Melbourne
Vacation Scholar (Artificial Intelligence Research)
Conducted research on the Intelligent Trading Agent (ITA) System project. Duties included
redeveloping the kernel of the ITA prototype and implementing it with a Java-based
Intelligent Agent development tool called JACK and Java for the web design and interaction.
The project required strong technical and communication skills to coordinate different
modules that were developed by other members of the development team.
1998 – 2004 RMIT University, Melbourne
University Tutor
Tutored groups of twenty to thirty students in: Computing Theory, Database Management
Systems, C Programming Principles, Foundations of Software Engineering, Bridging support
for Data Modeling, C & Advanced C Programming, Web Servers and Web Technology.

EDUCATION
2001 – 2004 RMIT University, Melbourne
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Completed a PhD in the area of Artificial Intelligence. My main focus was on simplifying the
development of Agent Oriented Systems by introducing the notion of goals and goal
oriented reasoning into practical systems. I have published and presented my work at
numerous international conferences.
2000 RMIT University, Melbourne
Bachelor of Applied Science Computer Science (Honors)
Majored in Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Database systems. Achieved High
Distinctions in all subjects which were: Intelligent Agents, Distributed Databases,
Database Engineering, Distributed systems, Research methods and also for my honors
thesis. I was ranked the number one honors graduate from the department of computer
science at RMIT for the year 2000. My honors thesis investigated the representation of goals
in Artificially Intelligent Software Agent Systems.
1997 – 1999 RMIT University, Melbourne
Bachelor of Applied Science Computer Science
Obtained High Distinctions in all subjects throughout the three year degree and ranked
the number one computer science graduate from RMIT for the year 1999.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
- Doctoral Mentoring chair of AAMAS 2009 as part of the organizational committee
(AAMAS is the top international conference on Intelligent Agents).
- Doctoral Mentoring chair for Australasian AI conference in 2013.
- Finance Chair of the Australian Computer Science Week 2012.
- Co-Chair of the International Programming Multi Agent Systems Workshop 2009.
- Senior Program Committee member of AAMAS 2010, 2011, and 2012, IJCAI 2011.
- Program Committee member of AAMAS 2005-2009, IJCAI 2007, 2009.
- Expert Reviewer for journals: JAAMAS, EAAI, IJAOSE
.
GRANTS AND AWARDS
- 2011 Telstra Innovation Award. Open-ended conversation based question answering
system. I presented the ideas to the Telstra board of execs. I featured on the front page
of “The Australian” newspaper IT section on the 24/01/2012 related to this.
- 2011 ARC Linkage LP110100050 “Tools, Methodologies and Reasoning Support for
Developing Companion Toy Modules” 3yrs $225,000
- 2010 ARC Discovery DP1094627 “Intention Selection in Intelligent Agent Systems”
3yrs $275,000 (CI)
- 2010 ARC Linkage LP100100037 “Automated Testing in Multi-Agent System
Development” 3yrs (CI) $230,000
- 2007 Emerging Researcher Grant Award, “Mechanisms for suspending and
resuming goals in Intelligent Agents” 6 months, $20,000
- 2004 The Microsoft Prize for Academic Excellence in the PhD Program – Best PhD
student.
- 2000 RMIT Computer Science Prize for best Honors Thesis.
- 2000 RMIT Computer Science Prize for Academic Excellence – Best Honors
student.
- 1999 Australian Computer Society Student Award – Best Undergraduate student.

SCHOLARSHIPS
- 2001 RMIT/APA PhD Scholarship
Received an annual living allowance for 3 years from RMIT to complete my PhD that is
the equivalent of an Australian APA award plus a substantial departmental award.
- 2000 RMIT Honors Student Scholarship
Received a grant of AU$5000 to do my honors degree in computer science at RMIT
University based upon my undergraduate results.
- 1997 RMIT International Student Scholarship
Received one of 3 scholarships for 25% off my tuition fee for my three years of my
undergraduate studies at RMIT University.
COMPUTING SKILLS
Programming Languages – C, C++, Java, iPhone and Android programming, Python,
ADA, LISP, Assembly
Software Development Methodologies – UML, Prometheus (Agent Oriented Software
Development Methodology)
Intelligent Agent Development Tools – JACK, JadeX, dMARS, GoRITE,
Operating Systems – UNIX, Mac OSX, Windows,
Other Skills – Database Management (Oracle, JDBC, SQL), PHP Scripting, Unix Shell
Scripts, Web Design and Digital Media HTML/XML, Distributed Database
Systems, Novell Network Administration (NetWare 5.0), CVS management.
EXTRA CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES AND LEADERSHIP
Senior First Aid – Currently hold this qualification.
Cricket Australia accredited Level 1 cricket coach.
RMIT Cricket Club - Captain/Coach – 2002 – present, President – 2003/2004,
Vice-President – 2002/2003, Treasurer 2008-2012
Co-founder of the RMIT cricket club which was founded in 2002. The RMIT Cricket Club,
is not just a university sports club but a community sports club that played under the
Mooney Valley District Cricket Association from 2002-2009 and the Victorian Turf Cricket
Association since 2010, which consists of over 70 clubs. In the history of the club, under my
various roles, I have successfully led the club’s senior side Premierships and to be regulars at
the Finals. I am also a Cricket Australia accredited Level 1 cricket coach.
PUBLICATIONS
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~johthan/publications.html
REFERENCES
Will be made available upon request.