Obituary: Emeritus Professor John Debenham
1944 - 2013
John's contribution to UTS has been enormous, and included both QCIS (Co-Director) and the Faculty of Engineering | ![]() |
John worked in Artificial Intelligence for over thirty years. His interests progressed from logic programming to knowledge-based design, to multi-agent systems, and recently, to market-based systems. His principal interest was in building intelligent agents that can be embedded in real, information-rich marketplaces.
Between 1985 and 1998 he worked on the design of expert, knowledge-based systems, which he reported in two research monographs, Knowledge Systems Design, Prentice-Hall, 1989, and Knowledge Engineering: Unifying Knowledge Base and Database Design, Springer-Verlag, 1998. From 1998 to 2002 he published extensively in the area of multi-agent systems to manage complex business processes. Since 2002, his work has concentrated on eNegotiation and argumentation agents. He was particularly interested in the design of agents that can exploit the information-rich environment of electronic markets. In collaboration with QCIS Adjunct Professor Carles Sierra (IIIA, Barcelona) he has been pioneering the foundations of information-based agency. Recent work has focussed on the evolution of normative multi-agent systems in unstable environments.
John received many ARC and other competitive research grants, and worked on a number of industry projects. He published hundreds of research papers, and chaired many research committees.
He was a man of wide vision and great personal warmth. His passing is an irreparable loss for QCIS, the School of Software and FEIT.