Homepage: http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~tobo/
Fellows Class: 2023
Personal Resume: Thomas Bolander, PhD, is a professor of logic and artificial intelligence (AI) at Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (DTU Compute), Technical University of Denmark (DTU). His main research focus is on the modelling of social phenomena and social intelligence with the aim of creating explainable computer systems that can interact robustly and intelligently with humans and other computer systems. His research involves logic (in particular dynamic epistemic logic), automated planning, knowledge representation, cognitive robotics, and neurosymbolic AI. He is one of the founders and main researchers within the area of Epistemic Planning providing AI agents, e.g. robots, with the ability to take the perspective of other agents into account when planning. This area combines epistemic logic and automated planning, areas that had been living very separate lives until the seminal paper on epistemic planning by Thomas Bolander and Mikkel Birkegaard Andersen in 2011. This paper received an editor’s choice award and is still by far the most cited paper on epistemic planning.
Thomas Bolander has been co-organiser of 15 conferences and workshops, 3 of them being workshops on epistemic planning. Most recently, Thomas Bolander was co-editor of a special issue of the Artificial Intelligence journal (AIJ) on epistemic planning. In addition to his technical research on AI, Thomas Bolander has also been serving in a number of commissions and think tanks working on the societal aspects of digitalisation and AI, and is currently serving on the expert committee on tech giants of the Danish government. He is also one of the central public communicators of AI in Denmark with 150+ popular science talks and 150+ media appearances on TV, radio, and in newspapers and magazines within the last 5 years. In 2019 he received the H.C. Ørsted award for excellence in science communication. He is also known for his innovations in teaching, having develop 12 different courses from scratch, and in 2006 he received the teacher of the year award at DTU.