Valentin Robu

Affiliation and Contact

• Affiliated Researcher, Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Sloan School of Management (Visiting Scholar in July/August 2018)
  • Email: vrobumit.edu
• Associate Professor, Smart Systems Group, ISSS/EPS, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland
  • Personal web page
  • Email: v.robuhw.ac.uk

Brief bio and research interests

I'm an associate professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, where I co-lead the Smart Systems Group. The core research interests of our group revolve around the application of distributed AI, multi-agent systems and computational intelligence to address a range of societal challenges, such as the smart power grid, monitoring complex assets and adaptive robots.

During July/August 2018, I was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Collective Intelligence at MIT, hosted by Dr. Mark Klein. (I maintain a connection with MIT as a research affiliate). With Mark, I am working on topics related to designing complex automated negotiation protocols among autonomous agents, which involve multiple, interdependent issues, by making use of advanced graph-theoretic techniques and computational geometry. We are also exploring exploring the potential applications of automated negotiation in smart energy grids.

Before coming to MIT, I also visited the EconCS group at Harvard University, collaborating with Prof. David Parkes and his student Hongyao Ma on algorithmic mechanism design for distributed energy demand response and electric vehicle charging. You can find more details about that work on my Harvard homepage.

Publications