Biography for Victor Lesser Name: Victor Lesser Organization: University of Massachusets - Amherst E-mail: lesser@cs.umass.edu

Victor R. Lesser received his B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1966, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science in the area of computer architecture from Stanford University in 1969 and 1972, respectively. He was then a research computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University until 1977. He has been a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Massachusetts on the Amherst campus since then and in 1992 became the director of the Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory. Professor Lesser was General Chairman of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS) held in June of 1995. He has also served on numerous AAAI and IJCAI program committees, most recently being an area chair for Communication and Cooperation at AAAI-93. He also has been active in organizing workshops on DAI and Blackboards. He is currently on the editorial boards for IEEE Expert,, Group Decision and Negotiation, and International Journal on Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems.

His major research focus is on the control and organization of complex AI systems. Professor Lesser is a founding fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and is considered a leading researcher in the areas of blackboard systems (he was the system architect for the Hearsay-II speech understanding system which was the first blackboard system developed), distributed AI/multiagent systems (he is considered one of the founders of the field), and real-time AI (he developed the concept of approximate processing and its use in design-to-time scheduling).

He has also made contributions in the areas of multiprocessor architectures, microprogramming, distributed operating systems, diagnostics, plan recognition, computer supported collaborative work, auditory scene analysis, and has recently been working on constructing agents for information gathering on WWW.