short bio

I studied Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the University of Sussex and began my doctoral studies in Philosophy at St John's College, Oxford. I later returned to Sussex where I obtained my D Phil in 1980. My main supervisor was Jerzy Giedymin and my examiner was Stephan Körner. From 1982-94 I worked at the Philosophy Institute of the Free University Berlin as a Lecturer (Hochschulassistent) and later as a Heisenberg Research Fellow funded by the DFG. From 1992-94 I was Acting Professor at the Universities of Göttingen and then Heidelberg. After 12 years in Berlin, in 1994 I moved to the German AI Research Centre (DFKI) in Saarbrücken, where I joined the group of Jörg Siekmann and coordinated one of the original European Networks of Excellence, in the field of Computational Logic. In 2000 I joined the Future and Emerging Technologies Unit of the European Commission in Brussels as a temporary researcher/project officer, which involved me in the management and supervision of EU research programmes, especially the programme “Global Computing”, involving 13 research projects for a total of 18.5mEUR, where I helped with the planning, implementation and supervision of the programme. In 2002 I moved to Madrid as Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow in the Computer Science department at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. In 2009 I joined the UPM as professor in the I3 programme.