Prof. Amnon Meisels has been a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University for 35 years, dating back to when it was still the Mathematics & Computer Science Dept. He served as head of the Computer Science Department., shortly after it was formed, from 2004 to 2006. He founded the Software Engineering program in 2000 and served as its head until 2004. SE is a 4-year joint program of the Dept. of Computer Science of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and the Department of Information Systems Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences.
His main field of research centers on the distributed search for constrained optimization and on network-based games that resemble asymmetric distributed constraints optimization problems (ADCOPs) in general. His book “Distributed Search by Constrained Agents” was published by Springer Verlag in January 2008. Prof. Meisels has served and continues to serve on the program committees of all major AI conferences that deal with constraints-based reasoning over the last 20 years.
In the last seven years, his group pioneered a major effort to investigate models for self-interested agents in Distributed Constrained Search. This research produced several groundbreaking papers. Two recent examples are the “Incentive-based search for efficient equilibria of the public goods game” (Artificial Intelligence Journal, 2018) and the “Incentive-based search for equilibria in Boolean games” (Constraints, 2019). In addition, an innovative search algorithm for finding efficient pure Nash equilibria in general multi-agent games was presented at the 24th International Conference on Constraints Processing (CP-2018). These palettes of algorithms and results have served as a basis for a joint research & development project financed by the Israeli Innovation Authority to design and produce a multi-agent system for managing the operating rooms at Soroka Medical Center in 2019-2021.
Prof. Amnon Meisels has published over 140 scientific papers across all primary AI Journals, such as AI Journal, JAIR, Constraints, JAAMAS, and in all major related conferences – IJCAI, AAAI, CP, AAMAS, and more. Over the years, he instructed close to 40 graduate students for 2nd and 3rd degrees at the Computer Science Department at BGU. Over the last 20 years, Prof. Meisels has been involved in establishing and reviewing Computer Science and Software Engineering programs in various colleges and universities. He designed the computer science program at Sapir College in 2000 and consulted and helped staff it until it became a successful CS department in 2010.
He currently heads the Computer Science program at Ono Academic College, where he was involved in proposing it from its inception in 2016 and in shaping its current form and high standards from its first class in 2019 until today.
