Juan Pavón (born 19 November 1962) is a Spanish computer scientist, full professor of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). He is a pioneer researcher in the field of Software Agents, co-creator of the FIPA MESSAGE and INGENIAS methodologies, and founder and director of the research group GRASIA: GRoup of Agent-based, Social and Interdisciplinary Applications at UCM. He is known for his work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, specifically in agent-oriented software engineering. He has been often cited by mainstream media, as a reference in Artificial Intelligence.
Biography
Education
Pavón belongs to the first Spanish generation to get official studies in Computer Science, during the 1980s. He studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Madrid, graduating in 1985. In 1988, he obtained his PhD in this area with the thesis: "Synthesis of communication protocols from service specifications". While doing this thesis, he worked as assistant professor at the same university. After his PhD, he joined Alcatel-Lucent R&D team, where he worked for 10 years. At the end of 1997 he got an Associate Professor position at UCM, and in 2006, he achieved the Habilitation à diriger des recherches qualification in Computer Science at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) with the thesis "INGENIAS : Développement Dirigé par Modèles des Systèmes Multi-Agents" (in French).
Career
He joined the Alcatel R&D department as a systems engineer. There, he worked on the development of software component-based architectures for distributed systems, and its applications for multimedia services over broadband networks and new generation mobile phones. During the 10 years he worked for the company, he spent periods in Alcatel centers outside Spain, such as France (Lannion and Vélizy) and Belgium (Namur and Antwerp). In this period, he worked several years in the labs of Bellcore in Red Bank, New Jersey (USA), working in the TINA-C Core Team, and helping to produce architectural models for telecommunication services. As a result, he published several popular works.
He then returned to the academic world, as an Associate Professor at the Computer Science School of the Complutense University of Madrid (1997). By then, he researched Multi-Agent Systems within the Eurescom project P815 "Communications Management Process Integration Using Software Agents" (1999) working with Telefónica R+D. His work in several projects combines software engineering practices and MAS. In the Eurescom P907 "Methodology for Engineering Systems of Software Agents", he co-created the MESSAGE methodology, currently part of the main FIPA software agent methodologies.
In 2000 he established the research group GRASIA for the research in Software Agents and Artificial Intelligence in the Complutense University of Madrid. He also held several management positions in the university, serving as Vice Dean for four years (1998–2002). Nowadays, he is full professor at the Universidad Complutense Madrid.
Work
Software Agents Research
Pavón work has focused on Software Agents and Agent-based simulation. His work on Software Agents started at the end of the 1990s, after they emerge as a new paradigm. His first project in the area was funded by Telefonica R+D, "Communications Management Process Integration Using Software Agents" (1999). Later he attracted funding for research projects from the 5th European Framework Programme (PSI3, DEMOS) and from Euroscom (P815, P907), all considered early applications of agents to software engineering processes. In the Eurescom P907 "Methodology for Engineering Systems of Software Agents", he co-created the MESSAGE methodology, currently part of the main FIPA software agent methodologies.
INGENIAS
His main contribution combining agent concepts in software engineering is the INGENIAS methodology and toolkit. INGENIAS (Engineering for Software Agents) is a complete framework for the analysis, design and implementation of multi-agent systems (MAS).
As a result of the research in these years, Jorge J. Gómez-Sanz published in 2002 his PhD thesis "A Methodology for the Development of Multi-Agent Systems" (in Spanish) advised by Francisco Garijo and Juan Pavón. This work constitutes the first version of the INGENIAS methodology and its meta-models.