Hector Geffner (born 1959 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher.[1,5,12] He serves as an Alexander von Humboldt Professor of artificial intelligence at RWTH Aachen University—a professorship awarded in 2023—and as a Wallenberg Guest Professor in AI at Linköping University.[5]
His research interests are centered on artificial intelligence and computer science, particularly automated planning and the integration of model-based AI and data-based AI. He is best known for his work on domain-independent heuristic planning and has received several International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) Influential Paper Awards (in 2009, 2010, and 2014).[9] In 2020, Geffner was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to explore the connection between machine learning and model-based AI.[10]
Geffner earned his PhD in computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989 under the supervision of Judea Pearl with the dissertation Default Reasoning: Casual and Conditional Theories, earning him an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1990.[3,11] He was a staff researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1990 to 1992, followed by a professorship at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela from 1992 to 2001. Beginning in 2001, he held a research professorship at ICREA and the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Group at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.[3,7] He was elected an AAAI Fellow in 2007 and is also a fellow and former board member of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).[10,2]
Life and work
Geffner earned his doctorate in 1989 at the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Judea Pearl with his dissertation Default Reasoning: Casual and Conditional Theories on the connections between logical, probabilistic, and causal inference, for which he received an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.[2,3] Following this, he worked from 1990 to 1992 as a research staff member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and from 1992 to 2001 as a professor at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. Since 2001, he taught as a research professor at the Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)) and in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Group of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. In 2019, he took up a Wallenberg Visiting Professorship at Linköping University in Sweden and was appointed to an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Artificial Intelligence at RWTH Aachen University in 2023.[2,5,4]
Geffner's research interest lies in artificial intelligence, in particular automated planning and the integration of model-based AI and data-based AI. He is best known for his work on heuristic planning, for which he received several ICAPS Influential Paper Awards.[6] In 2020, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to research the connection between machine learning and model-based AI.[7] Geffner is a former board member and current fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).[8]
External links
External links include Hector Geffner's homepage and the page for his research group at RWTH Aachen University. He is also categorized as an Argentine computer scientist, an artificial intelligence researcher, an alumnus of the University of California, Los Angeles, and a living person.