Ramon López de Mántaras

CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) Emeritus Research professor at the Institut d’Investigació en Intel·ligència Artificial (IIIA – Artificial Intelligence Research Institute), of which he was founder and director, he is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney and at Western Sydney University. A pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) in Spain and Europe, he has been researching in the field of AI since 1975. He was a lecturer in the Faculty of Computer Science in Barcelona, and Professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI) and was editor-in-chief of the European AI journal AI Communications, and associated editor of the world’s most prestigious AI publication Artificial Intelligence Journal). Author of more than 300 scientific papers and also of the popularising books on AI, Inteligencia artificial (Artificial Intelligence, Los Libros de la Catarata, 2017) and 100 coses que cal saber sobre intel·ligència artificial (100 Things You Need to Know about Artificial Intelligence, Cossetània, 2023), he has received many awards, among them, the City of Barcelona Prize for Research (1982), the Swets & Zeitlinger Award of the International Computer Music Association (1997), the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2011), the Distinguished Award of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (2016), the Donald E. Walker Award of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence (2017), and the Julio Rey Pastor National Research Award in Mathematics and Computer and Information Technologies (2018). He is an honorary member of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Institute for Catalan Studies, as well as being on several advisory committees on AI matters for American and European public institutions (especially of the French and German governments) and companies. Moreover, he was coordinator of the working group that produced the AI Research Strategy of the Spanish Ministry of Science. He is currently researching in the areas of analogical reasoning, and causal and transfer learning.