Prof Dr M.H.M. Winands

Mark Winands is the chair of the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences. He is a professor in machine reasoning, especially focussing on heuristic and adaptive search. He has published in international journals such as Artificial Intelligence Journal, IEEE Transactions on Games, Journal of AI Research, Knowledge-Based Systems, Information Sciences and Theoretical Computer Science. He is widely known of investigating underlying principles of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for which he has received two NWO grants. Successful applications  have been in the (video) game AI domain, structural engineering, job-scheduling, and quantum computing amongst others. He is frequently invited to speak on these topics at international meetings. Regarding other intelligent search techniques, he has made noticeable contributions in the minimax framework, hierarchical task networks and proof-number search.

He has been (co-)organizing several symposiums, workshops and conferences, such as the International Conference on Computers and Games 2008, the Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2012, and the Computer Games Workshops at IJCAI 2013/2015/2016/2017 and ECAI 2012/2014. He has been the program chair of the 15th International Conference on Advances in Computer Games, and the general chair of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. Next, he serves as the editor-in-chief of the ICGA Journal (SAGE Publishing),  associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Games (ToG), and member of the editorial boards of Theoretical Computer Science and Knowledge-Based Systems. Next, he is  vice-president of the International Computer Games Association. At the national level, he is a member of the Board of Governors for the Dutch research school for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS), member of the Kennistafel AI, and member of ICT platform Nederland (IPN). For the latter he also serves as a member of the Special Interest Group Artificial Intelligence.

Next, Mark Winands has been very active in the organization of education. He was the director of studies for the Bachelor Program Data Science & Knowledge Engineering (2010-2013, and 2017-2019), and the two Master Programs Artificial Intelligence and Data Science for Decision Making (2010-2013, and 2017-2020), which during his tenure have reached the number 1 position in the Keuzegids and Elsevier rankings. He also led the re-accreditation of these programs in 2013 and 2019, and led the accreditation of the Bachelor Computer Science in 2022. H also coordinated and organized the service education at RWTH Aachen, University College Maastricht, Maastricht Science Programme, and the master System Biology. In the past, he was also the Chair of the Board of Examiners (2014-2016), and Chair of the Board of Admission for both master programs (2015).