Les Gasser

Les Gasser is a Professor of Library and Information Science, with joint appointments in Computer Science and Computational Science/Engineering, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.A. in English Literature, Magna cum Laude, from the University of Massachusetts in 1976, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, in 1978 and 1984. He studies and teaches about Social Informatics and Multi-Agent Systems. In Social Informatics, he is looking into open source software, and electronic games. In Multi-Agent Systems, he studies language evolution for adaptive information systems. Dr. Gasser has published over seventy technical papers and five books in Social Informatics and Multi-Agent Systems. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he was at the University of Southern California, and has held visiting faculty posts at the University of Paris and the Ecole des Mines de Paris. He is Past-President and Secretary of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFMAS), and was one of the founders of that field. From 1996 to 1998 he directed the Program on Computation and Social Systems in the Computer Science Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He has significant project management, leadership, and entrepreneurial experience including co-directing a $10M, industry-university effort to develop theories, technology and methods for computer-supported design of high-performance organizations, later commercialized. He has also been a principal or advisor with a number of technology startup firms.