Ulle Endriss, appointed Professor of Artificial Intelligence & Collective Decision Making, UvA

Ulle Endriss has been appointed professor of Artificial Intelligence and Collective Decision Making at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), UvA.

Endriss pursues an innovative research agenda in AI dedicated to the design and analysis of mechanisms that enable people and autonomous software agents to take decisions together. He has made sustained contributions to the areas of Multiagent Systems and Knowledge Representation within AI, and he is known as one of the founders of the field of Computational Social Choice, situated at the interface of AI with Economics and Political Science.

As a professor, Endriss will continue to investigate fundamental questions regarding the nature of information aggregation across a range of domains of scientific, technological, and societal relevance. This includes, for instance, the design of principled algorithms to support new forms of democratic decision making, such as participatory budgeting, whereby citizens can vote directly on how to spend part of the public money available to a local community. He will also be studying mechanisms for aggregating the judgments of several experts in an optimal manner, the game-theoretical analysis of the incentives of agents to cooperate rather than compete in a multiagent system, and the development of methods to automatically explain and justify decisions taken on the basis of the preferences of a group of diverse stake-holders.

About Endriss

Endriss has been affiliated with the ILLC since 2005, first as assistant professor and then as associate professor. He directed the institute’s highly regarded MSc Logic programme from 2010 to 2015. In 2014, an NVAO (Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders) assessment panel called the Logic programme ‘one of the best, if not the best degree programme in Logic in the world’.

Over the years, Endriss has served the international AI community in a number of senior roles. He is currently Associate Editor of both Artificial Intelligence and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, the two leading journals publishing research across the full spectrum of AI, and he previously directed a major European research network on Computational Social Choice, which spanned more than 30 countries and involved over 500 individual researchers.

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