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 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.

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, may currently have openings for the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Dependable and Deployable AI for Robotics (CDT-D2AIR). This is a 4-year PhD programme jointly offered by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. You can find application information here.

Research Interests

I am interested in ensuring the safety of agentic AI systems (see AI safety). My work focuses on using formal and mathematical methods to understand and verify the behaviour of AI systems, especially those involving multiple autonomous AI agents (see multi-agent systems). I draw on techniques from formal verification, logic, and game theory. Here are the main areas I work on:

• 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.

News

• Mar 25: I am co-chairing (with Dan Frumin and Jorge A. Pérez) the RADICAL 2025 workshop, part of CONFEST 2025 in Aarhus.
• Dec 24: Paper accepted for AAAI’25, preprint here.
• Nov 24: Paper accepted at LMCS journal, preprint here.
• Jul 24: Paper accepted for ECAI’24, pdf here.
• Jun 24: I will be presenting a tutorial on Game-Theoretic Verification of Multi-Agent Systems at the 24th European Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS 2024) in Dublin, August 2024.
• May 24: Paper accepted for IJCAI’24, pdf here.
• Feb 24: I will be attending CSL’24 to present this paper, and then visiting Giuseppe Perelli at Sapienza Rome until 9 March.
• Jan 24: I am visiting Julian Gutierrez at Monash until 9 Feb.
• Aug 22: Joined Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, as an assistant professor.
• Jan 22: Our research project Optimal Decision-Making in Probabilistic Multi-Agent Learning Environment has been granted for Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme funding by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). (with Anthony W. Lin, and Julian Gutierrez and Frits de Nijs (Monash University)).
• Mar 20: My DPhil/PhD thesis “Rational verification in multi-agent systems” has been deposited in the Bodleian Library Oxford University Research Archive.
• Dec 19: I passed my DPhil/PhD thesis viva voce. I thank my examiners Alessio Lomuscio and Luke Ong for valuable feedback.