Dr. Mark Winands

Biography

Mark Winands is a professor of machine reasoning at Maastricht University, where he leads the chair Department of Advanced Computing Sciences. His research primarily focuses on heuristic adaptive search and he has published extensively in renowned international journals including the Artificial Intelligence Journal, IEEE Transactions on Games, Journal AI Research, Knowledge-Based Systems, and Information Sciences. Winands is well-known for his work on Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and has been awarded various grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) due to the successful applications of his research in video game AI, structural engineering, job scheduling, and quantum computing. He is frequently invited to speak at international conferences to discuss intelligent search techniques and has made significant contributions to the minimax framework, hierarchical task networks, and proof-number search methodologies. Furthermore, he has organized numerous symposiums and workshops, including the International Conference on Computers and Games and the Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and serves as the editor-in-chief of the ICGA Journal as well as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Games. Active in education, Winands has held various leadership roles in curriculum development and accreditation at Maastricht University.

Research Interests