Short Bio

Re my name: Family and friends call me Najib. As an Indonesian, where most people lack family names, both of my names are given. Feel free to use either.

I’m an Assistant Professor (or Lecturer in the traditional UK system) in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and a member of LAIV: Lab for AI Verification at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Additionally, I am an Associate Member of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. Prior to joining Heriot-Watt, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Anthony Lin at TU Kaiserslautern in Germany. I hold a DPhil/PhD from the University of Oxford (supervised by Julian Gutierrez and Mike Wooldridge), an MSc from the University of Liverpool, and a BSc from Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology. I also have industry experience as a R&D software engineer at Samsung Electronics in Indonesia.

Fully-funded PhD opportunities at Heriot-Watt: I am currently accepting applications from PhD students who are interested in working with me in my main research areas. Funding is available to cover both international tuition fees and living expenses. For more information, please visit the PhD opportunities in Computer Science page. If you have a potential project in mind, feel free to drop me an email to discuss further. I look forward to hearing from you!

The Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, where I am a member of the supervisory team, is now accepting applications for the September 2024 cohort. This is for the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Dependable and Deployable AI for Robotics (CDT-D2AIR), a 4-year PhD programme jointly offered by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. You can find application information here.

Research Interests

My research interests lie at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, and game theory. I use formal and mathematical techniques to verify and reason about systems composed of multiple self-interested intelligent agents. In particular, I mainly work on the following topics:

  • Logic and game theory in theoretical computer science and foundations of AI.
  • Verification, design, and synthesis of equilibria in concurrent multi-agent systems.
  • Mathematical/computational logic (e.g., modal and temporal logics).
  • Model checking, automated synthesis, and formal verification.
  • Computational complexity of problems related to topics above.

I am the main developer of EVE (Equilibrium Verification Environment), a tool for rational verification. The tool can be used online from http://eve.cs.ox.ac.uk. I am always interested in improving EVE (e.g., faster techniques, new use cases, etc.) and welcome potential collaborations.

Supervision Interests

I am interested in supervising PhD/MSc/BSc students who want to work on (or related to) topics within my research interests (see Research Interests section above). If you have a potential project in mind, feel free to drop me an email to discuss further.

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