Ramon López de Mántaras receives EurAI Award

Ramón López de Mántaras, CSIC research professor and director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), a CSIC-centre located at the UAB-CIE Sphere, was awarded a Distinguished Service Award from the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). The award is conferred every two years in recognition to the researchers making exceptional contributions in artificial intelligence in Europe. The nominees are proposed by the EurAI members and associations. It is the most prestigious award at the European level.

López de Mántaras is one of the pioneering scientists in Artificial Intelligence in Catalonia and one of the most renowned experts in Europe. With a PhD in Physics from the University of Toulouse III and a PhD in Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, some of his most known research works focus on computational creativity, with a special emphasis on music. He and his team were pioneered the creation of programmes capable of adding expressivity to musical interpretations.

He has also worked on case-based reasoning and on fuzzy logic applied to the navigation of robots. He became a CSIC researcher in 1985 and since 2007 he is the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), a member centre of the UAB-CIE Sphere.

In 2012 he received the National Computing Award from the Spanish Association of Computing. He has been associate editor of the international journal on artificial intelligence AI Journal (2007-2014) and president of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (January 2007 - July 2009); member of the board of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), from 2003 to 2013; and member of the executive committee of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) during two terms (1988-1990 and 1990-1992).