Short bio

Hector Geffner got his Ph.D at UCLA in 1989. He then worked as Staff Research Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in NY, USA and at the Universidad Simon Bolivar, in Caracas, Venezuela. Since 2001, he is a researcher at ICREA and a professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and since 2019, a Wallenberg Guest Professor at Linköping University, Sweden. Hector is a former Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and a Fellow of AAAI and EurAI. He is the author of the book Default Reasoning: Causal and Conditional Theories, MIT Press, 1992, and "A Concise Introduction to Models and Methods for Automated Planning" with Blai Bonet, Morgan and Claypool, 2013. He edited two books in tribute of Judea Pearl with Rina Dechter and Joe Halpern: "Heuristics, Probability, and Causality: a Tribute to Judea Pearl", College Publications, 2010, and Probabilistic and Causal Inference: The Works of Judea Pearl, ACM Books 2022. Hector is interested in computational models of reasoning, action, learning, and planning that are general and effective. He is also a concerned citizen (particularly concerned these days) and, aside from courses on logic and AI, he teaches a course on social and technological change. He leads a project on representation learning for acting and planning (RLeap), funded by an Advanced ERC grant, 2020-2025.