Catriona MacLeod

Research

Catriona leads euler-99, the cell working on long-horizon planning under partial observability and POMDP models for substrate-hosted agents. The cell's signature contribution is the substrate-integrated planning approach in which plans are first-class substrate objects rather than transient prompts.

She has been with alphabell since 2020 and is based in Glasgow. She is one of the lab's stronger writers on the question of what a plan has to be for an agent to survive interruptions, environment shifts, and information that arrives over weeks rather than seconds.

Catriona is on the cross-axis methodology review pool.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, University of Glasgow, 2014.

Prior to alphabell: Glasgow; Cantor Initiative; Hyperion Cognitive Lab.

Selected publications

• Apr 2025 · ab-agent-negotiat
  Negotiation Protocols Among Heterogeneous Agents: a benchmark and three baselines
  Roman Iliescu, Yvonne Akande, Lakshmi Ravi, Pascal Niedermeier
• Oct 2025 · ab-durable-agents
  Durable Agent Substrate v1: persistent state, learned tool affordances, and verifiable execution traces
  Mira Holloway, Dineth Karunaratne, Priya Anand, Cheung Wai-Lin
• Sep 2024 · ab-interpretabili
  Interpretability Cell Pairing: how every dual-use capability run gets a watchful sibling
  Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove, Yuki Cho
• Sep 2025 · ab-scalable-overs
  Scalable Oversight for Multi-Step Agent Systems: a Debate-Plus-Trace Approach
  Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard, Hiroshi Tanigawa, Maral Lotfi, Ruth Wernicke
• Oct 2024 · ab-federated-comp
  A Federated Compute Scheduler for an Asynchronous Research Lab
  Pranav Iyer, Yusra Habibi, Akoss Vidor

Full publications index →

Recent talks

• Long-horizon planning under POMDP, AAAI 2025
• Substrates and plans that survive interruption, ICAPS 2024