Amnon Meisels – A short Bio

Prof. Amnon Meisels has been a  faculty member of the department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University for the last 20 years. Served as head of the Computer Science dept.from 2004 to 2006. The main field of research of Amnon Meisels is Constraints Processing and in the last 7 years mostly Distributed Constrained Search. His book “Distributed Search by Constrained Agents”, was published by Springer Verlag in January 2008.
Since 2002 Prof. Meisels has lead a group of graduate students at BGU that have established algorithmic standards for distributed search on distributed constraints satisfaction problems (DisCSPs) and distributed constraints optimization problems (DisCOPs).
Prof. Meisels has served on the program committees of all major AI conferences that deal with constraints-based reasoning over the last 5 years. Specifically for Constraints Processing (CP conferences); IJCAI 2003-7; ECAI 2004-8; and the series of PATAT conferences on Automatic Timetabling, where he serves on the steering committee since 2000. In addition he has been part of the organizing committee of the series of workshops on distributed constraints reasoning (DCR series) every year since 2003.

Important research milestones of the DisCSP group at BGU that is headed by Prof. Meisels in the last 7 years include
•    Asynchronous forward-checking & Concurrent search - algorithms for DisCSPs
•    Asynchronous ordering heuristics for DisCSP algorithms
•    Concurrent run-time measures for experimental evaluation of DisCSP algorithms
•    Privacy preserving search methods for DisCSPs
•    Asynchronous Forward-bounding for DisCOPs – establishing the phase transition
•    A correct version of the APO algorithm and an extensive performance evaluation of DCOP algorithms
•    Asymmetric DCOPs – representing self-interested Agents in cooperative search