Papers & Presenters > Biography


Les Gasser is Associate Professor of Library and Information Science, joint with Computer Science, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research investigates interacting social and technical dimensions of large-scale information systems. Recently his group has developed methods to automatically reveal social processes represented open-source software bug report repositories, using the results to explain collective sensemaking and continuous design practices in open software groups. He is also working on problems of language evolution and distributed semantics. This work helps explain how groups of people adapt language over time (like languages for information indexing, search queries, product descriptions), how autonomous agents can evolve symbolic languages of their own, and how information retrieval, metadata, and web semantics can be reinvented as peer-to-peer collective processes. Dr. Gasser has published over seventy technical papers and five books in social informatics and multi-agent systems. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he was at the University of Southern California, and has held visiting faculty posts at the University of Paris and the Ecole des Mines de Paris. He is currently Past-President of the International Foundation for Multi-Agent Systems (IFMAS), and was one of the founders of that field. From 1996 to 1998 he directed the Program on Computation and Social Systems in the Computer Science Directorate of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Gasser holds a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.