Valentin Robu's homepage

Contents

• How to reach me
• Biography sketch
• Research interests
• Research projects
• Publications and papers
• Personal stuff (including pictures)
  
  

Contact information

Brief biography:

• Academic information
  
  I graduated in Computer Science Engineering at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. During the last two years, I studied for a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit , Amsterdam. Here I did my final thesis project on modelling multi-attribute negotiation with incomplete preference information. Before coming to the Netherlands, I also completed 2.5 years of studies in the Economics department (Banking and Stock Markets section) of Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj. I am currently pursuing my PhD studies as a junior researcher in the Evolutionary Systems and Applied Algorithmics group (SEN 4) at CWI (Dutch National Research Center for Mathematics and Computer Science) in Amsterdam.
  
  
• Other work experience
  
  During my university studies in the Netherlands, I worked part time (2 days/week) as a software developer at Almende B.V., Rotterdam. Here I had various responsabilities, from developing an interactive drag-and-drop Java applet (together with the corresponding server access scripts), to designing algorithms for automatic classification of caller and responders in a call center, based on stored caller profiles and feedback information. During my studies in Romania, I worked (on a part-time and holiday basis) at the Central Library of the University of Medicine in Cluj and at Sicbiblio SRL. My responsabilities here were mostly linked to data classification and retrieval and statistical techniques (e.g. designing an algorithm for ranking the quality of Romanian medical journals, based on a variety of criteria). If you still want to know more about me, a a copy of my CV can be sent on request. If you wish a copy of my academic transcript and/or references, please contact me.
  
  
  I moved to the University of Southampton UK, where I accepted a position as a research fellow in the group of Professor Nick Jennings.
  
  2 July 2008: I finally defended my PhD thesis at TU/e on the 2nd July. I want to thank all my committee members: Han La Poutre (my promotor!), Nick Jennings (Southampton), David Parkes (Harvard), Ton de Kok and Emile Aarts (TU/e and Philips Research), as well as Catholijn Jonker and Cees Witteveen (Delft) for agreeing to be in my committee. Moreover, many thanks to everyone who came, my family and former colleagues from CWI, especially my paranimfen Ivan Vermeulen and Anke Hutzschenreuter. You can see a photo of the whole committee here. More photos should be forthcoming soon!
  
  
  Older news:
  Dec. 2008: Our AAMAS'09 tutorial on Agent-mediated electronic negotiation has been accepted. You can find the text of the proposal here.
  Dec. 2008: Our AAMAS'09 workshop proposal (ACAN'09) has also been accepted. This is the (provisional) workshop website .
  Nov. 2008: Another Dagstuhl Seminar, this time on a rather different topic: Multiagent Planning Systems. Rather different in the studied topic, but also in style than the previous one, but also a really interesting event.
  Sept. 2008: I attended the Dagstuhl Seminar on Social Web Communities. Dagstuhl seminars are always great, but I think this one was especially interactive (and productive in terms of ideas that came out of it). Plus it is always great to see friends I collaborated with, such as Harry Halpin.
  July 2008: We've just been notified that the book "Advances in Complex Multi-Issue Negotiation", which I will co-editor together with Takayuki Ito, Minjie Zhang, Shaheen Fatima and Tokuro Matsuo will be published by Springer as part of their Studies in Computational Intelligence series.
  May 2008: Return from AAMAS in Estoril, Portugal, where (in chronological order) - we had 1 tutorial (multi-issue negotiation), I co-organized 1 workshop (ACAN - 1st Int. Workshop on Agent-mediated, Complex Automated Negotiation), 1 full and 1 demo paper in the main conference (related to the Industry Track), and 2 full workshop papers. A busy schedule, indeed, but everything went well, some things indeed than I expected. In case you start feeling sorry for me, I did get a 10-day holiday in Portugal and Spain afterwards.
  April 2008: From today, I am also a part-time (1 day/week) visiting lecturer in the Algorithmics Group at Technical University of Delft.
  Sept. 2007: Lonneke Mous, whom I advised, succesfully defended her Master Thesis in econometrics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, receiving highest honors. Congratulations Lonneke !
  Sept. 2007: I was honored to be invited as a co-organizer of the 3rd International Workshop on Rational, Robust and Secure Negotiations (RRS'07), held at the IAT 2007 conference in Silicon Valley, California in November. Unfortunately, I will not attend IAT this year, but it should be an interesting event.
  Mar. 2007: First results from a new line of work on sequential auction bidding accepted at the AMEC workshop (co-located with AAMAS'07), Honolulu, Hawaii.
  Jan. 2007: More good news: our paper on tagging with Harry Halpin (Edinburgh) and Hana Shepherd (Princeton) was accepted for WWW'07 (Banff, Canada). Given that this research resulted from a Santa Fe summer school project and WWW is one of the most selective conferences in CS (14.7%), I was very pleased with the results.
  Dec. 2006: Our tutorial proposal: Agent-mediated electronic negotiation was accepted at AAMAS 2007 as T8. See you in sunny Hawaii in May!
  Nov. 2006: Sander van der Putten (master student from TU Eindhoven, for which I was a daily supervisor) receives the prestigious Bakkenist prize from the Royal Holland Society for Sciences and Humanities (i.e. Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen). This yearly prize is awarded for the best master thesis in information systems in the Netherlands. Way to go, Sander! You can read the AAMAS'06 paper that resulted from Sander's work here.
  Nov. 2006: My journal paper (with Catholijn Jonker and Jan Treur) was accepted in JAAMAS. You can download a copy of it here.
  April 2006: I was awarded a scholarship by the Santa Fe Institute to attend their flagship Complex Systems Summer School. So I'll be in the US for the whole of June! If you are curious to find out more about my research interests, you also check out my profile there.
  Nov. 2005: I just found out that I was nominated among the 33 most promising young Romanian scientists under 35 years of age, in a survey conducted by the Romanian national daily Cotidianul. This was part of a programme called "Generatia Asteptata" (Engl. "The expected generation"), which selected 200 young Romanians, identified as future leaders in their field. While I think such "tops" are always controversial, I feel very honoured to be among the ones selected. If you know Romanian, you can read all about it here.

Research interests (partial list, always evolving...)

• Decentralized Electricity Markets
  
• Preference Aggregation and Preference Elicitation
  
• Agent-Mediated, Complex, Multi-issue Negotiation
  
• Repeated and Sequential Auctions
  
• Probabilistic (Bayesian), Evolutionary and Fuzzy Learning techniques
  
• Data mining and Collaborative Filtering
  
• Dynamics of Complex Systems
  
• Collaborative Tagging
  
• Agents in Traffic and Transportation
  

Research projects

• I am mostly involved in the Distributed Engine for Advanced Logistics (DEAL) project. The aim of this large-scale project is to investigate the use of multi-agent systems in logistics management and planning, especially the logistics of the transportation sector. My research mostly focuses on the market-based aspects of this project (e.g. modelling negotiation techniques which lead to an efficient allocation of tasks). The academic partners of CWI in this project are Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Erasmus University in Rotterdam , while the industrial partners are: Almende B.V. Rotterdam, and the transportation companies VOS Logistics Nijmegen, Post Kogeko and Groeneveld.
  
  I also take an interest in the related Cybernetic Incident Management (CIM) project. The aim of this project is to develop adaptive, agent-based solutions for incident and disaster management. This project also involves the CABS group at the Technical University of Delft and the security group Falck.

Selected publications

        Monographs, edited proceedings & journal covers

        PhD Thesis

• Robu, V. Modeling Preferences, Strategic Reasoning and Collaboration in Agent-Mediated Electronic Markets, CWI, National Research Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam & Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e), 2 July 2009

        Journal articles and book chapters

• Halpin, H., Robu, V., Shepherd, H. - Emergence of Consensus and Shared Vocabularies in Collaborative Tagging Systems, In: ACM Transactions on the Web, ACM Press, October 2009 (pre-print version)
• Robu, V., La Poutré J.A.- Designing Bidding Strategies in Sequential Auctions for Risk-Averse Agents , In: Multi-Agent and Grid Systems, IOS Press, 2010 (to appear)
• Mous, L. Robu, V., La Poutré J.A.- Can Priced Options Solve the Exposure Problem in Sequential Auctions? ACM SIGecom Exchanges, vol 7(2), June 2008.
• Jonker, C., Robu, V., Treur, J. An Agent Architecture for Multi-Attribute Negotiation Using Incomplete Preference Information, In: Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS), Springer-Verlag (Sept., 2007)
• Robu, V., La Poutré J.A.- Retrieving the Structure of Utility Graphs Used in Multi-Item Negotiation through Collaborative Filtering of Aggregate Buyer Preferences In Takayuki, Ito, Hiromitsu Hattori, Minjie Zhang (eds.) Rational, Robust and Secure Negotiations, Springer Series on Computational Intelligence, vol. 89, 2008.
• 't Hoen, P.J, Redekar, G., Robu, V., La Poutre, J.A. Decommitment in a Competitive Multi-Agent Transportation Setting, In: Calisti, M., Klusch, M., Unland, R. (eds.), "Software Agent-Based Applications, Platforms and Development Kits". Birkhauser, Springer-Verlag, 2006.

  International conference and workshop proceedings

• Robu, V., La Poutre, H., Bohte, S. - The Complex Dynamics of Sponsored Search Markets, Agents and Data Mining Interaction, Spinger LNAI vol. 5680, May 2009.
• Robu, V., Noot, H., La Poutré, H., van Schijndel, W.J.- An Interactive Platform for Auction-Based Allocation of Loads in Transportation Logistics Proc. of AAMAS'08 Industry Track, Estoril, Portugal, 2008
• Mous, L., Robu, V., La Poutre, H.- Using Priced Options to Solve the Exposure Problem in Sequential Auctions Proc. of 10th Int. Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce Workshop (AMEC'08), Estoril, 2008 (post-proceedings published by Springer).
• Halpin, H., Robu, V., Shepherd, H.- The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging , Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'07), Banff, Canada, 2007 (ACM Press, full paper acceptance rate: 14.7%).
• Robu, V., La Poutre, H.- Designing bidding strategies in sequential auctions for risk averse agents Proc. of the 9th Int. Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC'07), Honolulu, Hawaii, 2007 (full paper, post-proceedings to appear in Springer LNBI).
• Robu, V., La Poutré J.A.- Retrieving the Structure of Utility Graphs Used in Multi-Item Negotiation through Collaborative Filtering of Aggregate Buyer Preferences , Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Rational, Robust and Secure Negotiations in Multi-Agent Systems (RSS'06), Hakodate, Japan, 2006 (full paper, Best Student Presentation Award)
• Putten, S.v.d., Robu, V., La Poutré, J.A., Jorritsma, A., Gal, M.- Automating Supply Chain Negotiations using Autonomous Agents: a Case Study in Transportation Logistics, Proceedings of AAMAS'06 (Industry Track), Hakodate, Japan, 2006 (full paper, acceptance rate: <50%)
• Robu, V., Somefun, D.J.A., La Poutré J.A. Modeling Complex Multi-Issue Negotiations Using Utility Graphs , Proc. of the Fourth Int. Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'05), Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 2005 (full paper, acceptance rate: 24%)
• Jonker, C.M., and Robu, V., Automated Multi-Attribute Negotiation with Efficient Use of Incomplete Preference Information , Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'04), New York, July 2004 (full paper, acc. rate: 24%)

  Conference tutorials

• La Poutre, H., Robu, V.- Agent-mediated electronic negotiation (bargaining mechanisms), Tutorial slides for the International Joint Conf.on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'07), Honolulu, Hawaii, 2007.

       Thank you for showing interest in my work. If you are working on the same topics, or you have any questions/suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me !

Personal stuff

• In my spare time I collect and research information about Romanian revenue (fiscal) stamps, work for which I got various awards at philatelic exhibitions. If you came across my page looking for this, I keep all the information about it here . Other than philately, I also enjoy reading, listening to music, swimming and walking. Before I came to the Netherlands, I helped organise and start-up the activity of Mensa Romania.
  
  And here some pictures of places I visited:
  
  New York, July 2004 (part 1)
  EIDMA course, Eindhoven (Eva Tardos)
  (Pics from Germany, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok to be added soon!)