Hector Geffner is an ICREA Research Professor at our Department. He obtained a BSc in Electrical Engineering at the Universidad Simon Bolivar, and a MSc in Systems Science and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at UCLA. After his Ph.D., he worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in NY, USA (1989 - 92), and at the Universidad Simon Bolivar, in Caracas (1992 – 2001). He also taught at Stanford University, Aachen University of Technology, Linköping University, Universite Paul Sabatier, King's College, and the University of Edinburgh, among other places. Since 2001 he heads the Artificial Intelligence group.

He works on planning and plan recognition in intelligent systems, developing methods for generating and recognizing autonomous behavior automatically using model-based methods. He is the recipient of the 1990 ACM Dissertation Award, and is best known for the heuristic search approach to planning for which he received the 2009, 2010, and 2014 ICAPS Influential Paper Awards. He is a fellow of both the American and European Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI, ECCAI), and Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence (AIJ) and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).