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Advanced Technology > Scientific Research > Vector Research Center > Staff Biographies

Staff Biographies

H. Van Dyke Parunak
Chief Scientist, Jacobs Technology’s Vector Research Center (VRC)

Van Parunak is VRC’s Chief Scientist. He has extensive experience in academic and industrial environments with chaos and complex systems, artificial intelligence, distributed computing, and human interfaces. He founded the AI group and directed their research, and now leads VRC's projects in swarming and self-organization, software agents, and nonlinear dynamics.

Parunak is the author or co-author of more than 100 technical articles and reports, including three papers selected or nominated for "best paper" at prestigious conferences. His publications include research in analysis of multi-agent systems using statistical physics, synthetic evolution, self-organizing behavior, and simulation and modeling. He is in the top 0.6% of computer science researchers by citation. He is a founding director of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the leading academic society for multi-agent research, and serves on the editorial boards of JAAMAS, ACM TAAS, Swarm Intelligence, and other international journals, and on the program committee of numerous conferences. He is an inventor on twelve patents and four patents pending in agent technology. He has served as Principal Investigator on numerous complex multi-partner projects.

Parunak holds a Top Secret clearance. He received an AB in Physics from Princeton University (1969), an MS in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan (1982), and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University (1978).

Sven Brueckner
Senior Research Scientist, Jacobs Technology’s Vector Research Center (VRC)

Sven Brueckner is a Senior Research Scientist at VRC. He has been active in multi-agent systems research for more than fifteen years. His doctoral thesis researches the theoretical foundations of agent system design and applies its findings to complex manufacturing control systems. It lays the foundation for VRC’s swarming agent technology, which has been extended and applied to many different domains.

Since joining VRC in 2000, he has been the technical lead on numerous agent-focused R&D efforts. Recently, Brueckner was technical lead and project manager in VRC’s IARPA CASE and PAINT projects after leading the DTO NIMD project. He also led VRC projects in ONR Counter-IED research initiatives, extending the fundamental science of predictive polyagent systems and applying swarming pattern analysis techniques to reason “up the IED event chain”.

Brueckner has authored more than twenty papers on agent-based and complex systems theory and application. He is named as inventor on four recent patents or patent filings. His strong standing in the academic community is also reflected in his participation in Program and Organizational Committees of many prestigious conferences and workshops. Currently, Dr. Brueckner serves as General Co-Chair for the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO’11). Dr. Brueckner was awarded his PhD by Humboldt University Berlin, Germany (2000). His dissertation research was supported by Daimler AG.