Karl Tuyls

Biography

Karl Tuyls is a fulltime Professor of Computer Science at the department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool since September 2013, and is also a part-time Professor of Bio-Inspired Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Delft Center for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands since April 2014. His main research interests span the areas of robotics, swarm intelligence, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, and evolutionary game theory. Previously, he held positions at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Hasselt University, Eindhoven University of Technology, and Maastricht University. Tuyls obtained a Phd in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium in 2004, after which he was subsequently a postdoc researcher at Hasselt University and Maastricht University. He was promoted to the assistant professor level early 2006 in Maastricht, and spent 1,5 years at Eindhoven University of Technology from 2008 until the summer of 2009. In August 2009 he was promoted to the Associate Professor level at Maastricht University, after which he founded the Swarmlab robotics laboratory that he directed until January 2014. From October 2010 until September 2013 he was the scientific director of the department of knowledge engineering (DKE) at Maastricht University, and a member of DKE’s management team. In 2013 he became a full professor and moved to the University of Liverpool.

Prof. Tuyls has received several awards and honourable mentions with his research, amongst which: the Information Technology prize 2000 in Belgium, best demo award at AAMAS’12, winner of the German Open robocup@work competitions in 2013 and 2014, world champion of the RoboCup@Work competition in 2013 and 2014, etc. Furthermore, his research has received substantial attention from national and international press and media (http://tuyls.com). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and is editor-in-chief of the Springer briefs series on Intelligent Systems. Prof. Tuyls is also a member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

Qualifications

  • Doctoral degree, 2004, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
  • Masters degree, 2000, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
  • Bsc degree (kandidaats), 1998, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Honours & Awards

  • FOCAS Best Paper award at ALA’14, for “Trading in markets with noisy information: an evolutionary analysis”
  • Winner of Robocup 2014 @work league, Robocup’14, world champion with SwarmLab@work, Joao Pessoa, Brasil
  • Winner of German Open 2014 @work league, German Open’14
  • Best Demonstration award winner, BNAIC’2013, "Applied Robotics: Precision Placement in RoboCup@Work"
  • Winner of Robocup 2013 @work league, Robocup’13, world champion with SwarmLab@work, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
  • Winner of German Open 2013 @work league, German Open’13 Robocup@work competition with SwarmLab@work, Magdeburg, Germany
  • Best Demonstration award winner, AAMAS’2012, "CALU: Collision Avoidance with Localization Uncertainty"
  • Elected ’TOP DOG’, Faculty of Humanities and Sciences (FHS), best researcher FHS, Maastricht University, May 2007
  • Information Technology Prize 2000 for master dissertation, nationwide prize for best master thesis, international jury, Belgium.

Several of prof. Tuyls’ papers have also been runner up or nominated for best paper award prizes at a variety of international conferences.

 (Selection of) Keynote, plenary and special invited lectures

  • Bio-Inspired Autonomous Systems and Robotics. Keynote talk at ALIA’14, November 6th 2014
  • Slimme Robots. Plenary talk at Kidzcollege, Netherlands. May 22nd 2013, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
  • From honeybee to robot. Plenary talk at Insect and Society, Wageningen University, February 27th 2013.
  • Learning in Multi-agent and robot systems. Keynote Talk at Complex Systems winterschool, organized by NWO, Zandvoort Netherlands. December 10th 2012.
  • Slimme Robots. Plenary talk at Kidzcollege, Netherlands. June 1st 2011, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
  • The intelligence of a swarm of bees transferred to robots. Invited talk at the "Inspired by talent session", 34th Dies Natalis of Maastricht University, dies natalis 2010
  • Plenary talk: What Evolutionary Game Theory tells us about Multi-Agent Learning, Advanced Course on Computational Intelligence of SIKS (Dutch School for Information and Knowledge Systems), Zeist, October 23rd 2008, the Netherlands
  • Plenary talk: An Evolutionary Dynamical Analysis of Multi-Agent Learning, Almende summer school on Multi-agent systems, August 27th, 2008, The Netherlands
  • Plenary talk: An Introduction to agent systems, Complex systems summer school Manchester, July 4th, 2007, UK
  • Robots in the classroom; How agents will change our society. Invited talk at the "Inspired by talent session", 31st Dies Natalis of Maastricht University, January 12 2007.
  • Evolutionary Game Theory and Reinforcement Learning in Multi-Agent Systems. Invited talk at the International symposium on Social Connectionism. 16-19 June 2004, Genval, Belgium. Belgium.

Professional Activities

  • Editor-in-chief (series editor) of Springerbriefs in Intelligent Systems (Springer).
  • Associate editor of The Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS)
  • Associate editor of the Entertainment Computing Journal (Elsevier)
  • Member of the IFAAMAS board of directors (International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems)
  • Member of the IEEE RAS technical committee on robot learning, see http://www.learning-robots.de
  • Board member of the Machine Learning Platform, the Netherlands
  • Member and co-founder of the steering committee of the Adaptive and Learning Agents symposium (research community)
  • Fellow of Siks (Netherlands school for information and knowledge systems), school on computational intelligence (2006-2014).
  • Board member of the ICIS consortium (Interactive Collaborative Information Systems), AgentschapNL, 2006-2010.
  • Board member of the dept. of Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University. (2010-2013)
  • Board member of research platform Maastricht University, representative Faculty Humanities and Sciences.  (2010-2013)

Organization of Conferences / Workshops

  • Program co-chair of the 16th Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems Conference, TAROS’15.
  • Demonstration track co-chair of the 14th international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2014), Paris, France.
  • Workshop chair of the 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'14), Prague, CZech Republic.
  • Doctoral mentoring chair of the 13th international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2014), Paris, France.
  • Local chair of 2D simulation league robocup 2013, Eindhoven, Netherlands; see www.robocup2013.org
  • Co-chair of the Theoretically Grounded Transfer Learning workshop, held at ICML 2013, June 21st, Atlanta, USA
  • Exhibition chair of the 11th international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2012), Valencia, Spain.
  • General co-chair of the ninth European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2011), November 14-15, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
  • Program co-chair of the Interactive Decision Theory and Game Theory workshop, held at AAAI 2011, August 8th, San Francisco, USA.
  • Program co-chair of the Interactive Decision Theory and Game Theory workshop, held at AAAI 2010, July 12th, Atlanta, USA.
  • Program co-chair  of the Belgium-Netherlands conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC 2009), 25-26 Ocotber 2009, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
  • Program co-chair of the Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop, ALA 2009. Held as Part of the AAMAS 2009 Conference in Budapest, Hungary, May 12, 2009
  • Program co-chair of the Adaptive and Learning Agents workshop, Held as Part of the AAMAS 2008 Conference in Estoril, Portugal, May 12, 2008
  • Program chair of The 7th European Symposium on Adaptive Learning Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2007 (ALAMAS), Maastricht April 2nd and 3rd.
  • Program co-chair of the workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Emergent Complexity in Bioinformatics (KDECB 2006), May 10th, Ghent, Belgium.
  • Co-chair of the third European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2005), 7-8 December 2005, Brussels, Belgium.
  • Program co-chair of the Belgium-Netherlands conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC 2005), 17-18 October 2005, Brussels, Belgium.
  • Program co-chair of the first International workshop on Learning and Adaptation in Multi-Agent System (LAMAS 2005), 25th July 2005, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
  • Local organizer of the Belgium-Netherlands conference on Machine Learning (Benelearn 2004), January 2004, Brussels, Belgium.

 Teaching Areas

  • Machine Learning
  • Probabilistic Robotics
  • Swarm Intelligence and Bio-Inspired Optimization
  • Programming

 Research Interests

  • Multi-Robot and Agent Systems
  • Bio-Inspired Optimization and Swarm Intelligence
  • Evolutionary Game Theory
  • Machine Learning
  • Multi-Agent Decision Making

 Selected Publications

  1. Mihail Mihaylov, Karl Tuyls, Ann Nowé: A decentralized approach for convention emergence in multi-agent systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 28(5): 749-778 (2014)
  2. Haitham Bou-Ammar, Siqi Chen, Karl Tuyls, Gerhard Weiss: Automated Transfer for Reinforcement Learning Tasks. KI 28(1): 7-14 (2014)
  3. Bijan Ranjbar Sahraei, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Daan Bloembergen, Karl Tuyls, Gerhard Weiss: Theory of Cooperation in Complex Social Networks. AAAI 2014: 1471-1477
  4. Bijan Ranjbar Sahraei, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Daan Bloembergen, Karl Tuyls, Gerhard Weiss: Evolution of cooperation in arbitrary complex networks. AAMAS 2014: 677-684
  5. Daan Bloembergen, Bijan Ranjbar Sahraei, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Karl Tuyls, Gerhard Weiss: Influencing Social Networks: An Optimal Control Study. ECAI 2014: 105-110
  6. Siqi Chen, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Karl Tuyls, Gerhard Weiss: Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines for Negotiations in Highly Competitive and Complex Domains. IJCAI 2013
  7. Daniel Hennes, Daniel Claes, Wim Meeussen, Karl Tuyls: Multi-robot collision avoidance with localization uncertainty. AAMAS 2012: 147-154
  8. Daniel Claes, Daniel Hennes, Karl Tuyls, Wim Meeussen: Collision avoidance under bounded localization uncertainty. IROS 2012: 1192-1198
  9. Karl Tuyls and Gerhard Weiss. Multiagent learning: Basics, Challenges, Prospects. AI Magazine. 33(3): 41-52, 2012.
  10. Nyree Lemmens and Karl Tuyls. Stigmergic Landmark Optimization, Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 15(8), 2012.
  11. Steven de Jong, Karl Tuyls: Human-inspired computational fairness. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 22(1): 103-126 (2011)
  12. Nyree Lemmens, Karl Tuyls: Stigmergic landmark routing: a routing algorithm for wireless mobile ad-hoc networks. GECCO 2010: 47-54
  13. Michael Kaisers, Karl Tuyls: Frequency adjusted multi-agent Q-learning. AAMAS 2010: 309-316
  14. Steven de Jong, Simon Uyttendaele, Karl Tuyls: Learning to Reach Agreement in a Continuous Ultimatum Game. J. Artif. Intell. Res. (JAIR) 33: 551-574 (2008)
  15. Liviu Panait, Karl Tuyls, Sean Luke: Theoretical Advantages of Lenient Learners: An Evolutionary Game Theoretic Perspective. Journal of Machine Learning Research 9: 423-457 (2008)
  16. Ben Torben-Nielsen, Karl Tuyls, Eric O. Postma: EvOL-Neuron: Neuronal morphology generation. Neurocomputing 71(4-6): 963-972 (2008)
  17. Steven de Jong, Karl Tuyls, Katja Verbeeck: Fairness in multi-agent systems. Knowledge Eng. Review 23(2): 153-180 (2008)
  18. Karl Tuyls, Simon Parsons: What evolutionary game theory tells us about multiagent learning. Artif. Intell. 171(7): 406-416 (2007)
  19. Ronald L. Westra, Goele Hollanders, Geert Jan Bex, Marc Gyssens, Karl Tuyls: The pattern memory of gene-protein networks. AI Commun. 20(4): 297-311 (2007)
  20. Liviu Panait, Karl Tuyls: Theoretical advantages of lenient Q-learners: an evolutionary game theoretic perspective. AAMAS 2007: 40
  21. Geert Jan Bex, Frank Neven, Thomas Schwentick, Karl Tuyls: Inference of Concise DTDs from XML Data. VLDB 2006: 115-126
  22. Karl Tuyls, Ann Nowé: Evolutionary game theory and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Knowledge Eng. Review 20(1): 63-90 (2005)
  23. Pieter Jan't Hoen, Karl Tuyls: Analyzing Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Using Evolutionary Dynamics. ECML 2004: 168-179
  24. Karl Tuyls, Katja Verbeeck, Tom Lenaerts: A selection-mutation model for q-learning in multi-agent systems. AAMAS 2003: 693-700