Short Biography

Edmund H. Durfee received the AB degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., in 1980, the MS degree in electrical and computer engineering and the PhD degree in computer and information science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass., in 1984 and 1987, respectively. His PhD research developed an approach for planning coordinated actions and interactions in a network of distributed AI problem-solving systems.

He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, where his interests are in distributed artificial intelligence, planning, and real-time problem solving. He has published extensively in these areas, and is author of the book Coordination of Distributed Problem Solvers (Kluwer Academic Press). In his most recent work, he has been designing a framework for coordination based on hierarchical, multi-dimensional behavior specifications, and he has been developing an integrating architecture for combining real-time and intelligent systems. He is a 1991 recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1988, he was a Research Computer Scientist in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts. He is an associate editor for the International Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and has served on many conference and workshop program committees, including being a program co-chair for the 1998 International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS) and the Conference Chair for the 2000 ICMAS. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a fellow of the IEEE (Computer Society), and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.