Prof. Edmund H. Durfee to Receive Alumni Award from University of Massachusetts

Prof. Edmund H. Durfee has been selected to receive an Outstanding Achievement in Research Alumni Award from the University of Massachusetts Computer Science Department. The award will be presented at UMass’s fourth annual Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy Awards Banquet on May 4, 2012.

Prof. Durfee’s research interests are in distributed artificial intelligence, multi-agent coordination, and intelligent real-time systems. He has published extensively in these areas, and is the author of the book, “Coordination of Distributed Problem Solvers” (Kluwer Academic Press). In his recent work, he develops and studies computational mechanisms for planning and coordinating the activities of sophisticated, autonomous computational agents that adjust their behaviors to achieve their individual or collective objectives in time-critical environments. His work has been recognized in 2008 and 2010 with Influential Paper awards from the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (IFAAMAS).

Prof. Durfee received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts Amhert in 1987 for his work in planning coordinated actions and interactions in a network of distributed AI problem-solving systems. He joined the faculty at Michigan in1998 and is associated with the Artificial Intelligence Lab. He received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award in 1991, and is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.