Biographies

Short Biographies of project leaders at IIIA-CSIC, URJC and UPV.

Professor Carles Sierra (IIIA’s co-ordinator) received his M.Sc. in Computer Science (1986) and his PhD in Computer Science (1989) from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. His current research interests include: Formal methods, multiagent systems, uncertainty, and robotics. He has participated in more than twenty research projects funded by the European Commission and the Spanish Government, and has published more than two hundred papers in specialised conferences and scientific journals. Recently, he has been particularly active in the area of electronic institutions. He has published several papers on modelling electronic auctions, and on automatic negotiation models among autonomous agents. He has actively served the community of agents as general chair of ‘Autonomous Agents 2000’, co-ordinator of the European Special Interest Group on Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce, and recently as PC chair of AAMAS 2004. He is currently an ECCAI Fellow, and a member of the IFAAMAS (International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) and EUMAS (European Conference on Multiagentt Systems) boards. He will be the local organiser of the IJCAI-11 conference that will take place in Barcelona. He has received several best paper awards in the area of agents and artificial intelligence and is member of four editorial boards of journals in the area of multiagent systems, including the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

Professor Sascha Ossowski (URJC's co-ordinator) is the Director of the Centre for Intelligent Information Technologies (CETINIA) at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. Formerly, he was an HCM/TMR research fellow at the AI Department of Technical University of Madrid. He obtained his MSc degree in Informatics from the University of Oldenburg (Germany) in 1993, and received a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from UPM in 1997. Prof. Ossowski is holding several research grants in the field of advanced software systems, funded by the European Commission and the Spanish Government. He has authored more than 100 research papers, focusing on the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques to real world problems such as transportation management, m-Health, or e-Commerce. Recently, he has been particularly active in the field of co-ordination mechanisms for agents and services, as well as models of trust and regulation in virtual organisations. He is co-editor of more than 20 books, proceedings, and special issues of international journals. He is a General Chair of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), chairs the Steering Committee of the European workshop series on Multiagent Systems (EUMAS), serves as a member of the editorial board for several international journals, and acts as programme committee member for numerous international conferences and workshops. Prof. Ossowski is also an Associate Manager for the field of Computer Science within the Spanish National Plan for R&D&I.

Professor Vicente J. Botti (UPV’s co-ordinator) received a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering (1983) and the PhD in Computer Science (1990) from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain. He is currently a Full Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, where he has also been the Head of the Dept. of Informatic Systems and Computation. His current research interests include: multiagent systems (more specifically real time multiagent systems), methodologies for developing multiagent systems, artificial societies, real time systems, mobile robotics (in which he has developed his own models, architectures and applications) and softcomputing techniques. He is leader of a large research group whose general lines of research are Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems. He has participated in more than thirty research projects funded by the European Commission and the Spanish Government (head researcher of ten of these projects), and has participated in more than ten technology transfer agreements (head researcher of five of these agreements). He has published more than two hundred papers in specialised conferences and scientific journals. Recently, he has been particularly active in the areas of multiagent system platforms and MAS development methodologies. He has actively served the community of artificial intelligence/MAS as organizing chair of the ‘16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2004)’ and the ‘9th European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multiagent World, MAAMAW '99’; as well as being a member of various program committees in these areas (AAMAS, EUMAS, HoLoMAS, ….) and PC chair of the ‘Seventh International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL'06)’.