Victor R. Lesser is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Director of Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory. He is widely considered as the founding father of multi-agent systems. He received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 2009. Professor Lesser is a noted researcher in multi-agent and blackboard systems. His major research focus was on the control and organization of complex AI systems. He also made contributions to real-time AI, computer architecture, signal understanding, diagnostics, plan recognition, and computer-supported cooperative work. He worked on applications in sensor networks for vehicle tracking and weather monitoring, speech and sound understanding, information gathering on the internet, peer-to-peer information retrieval, intelligent user interfaces, distributed task allocation and scheduling, and virtual agent enterprises. Professor Lesser is a Founding Fellow of the Association fo