Luis Antunes holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of Lisbon (2001). He has been a researcher in AI since 1988 and published more than 80 refereed scientific papers. He was the founder and first director of the Group of Studies in Social Simulation (GUESS). Luis Antunes is on the Program Committee of the most important international conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Agent Systems and Social Simulation, including Senior PC member of AAMAS, and PC member of ECAI, ESSA, WCSS and MABS. He was co-chair of MABS 2005, 2006, 2007, 2016 and 2017, and co-editor of the Springer proceedings volumes. He is or was a member of the MABS Steering Committee, of EUMAS Advisory Board, member of ESSA Management Committee and of APPIA (Portuguese Association for AI) board of directors. Antunes hosted EUMAS 2006, AAMAS 2008, and ECAI 2010 as co-chair of the organising committee. He was the proponent and a co-chair of the first IJCAI workshop on Social Simulation (2009), the founder of the first Portuguese Workshop on Social Simulation as a Special Track of EPIA, and the Program Co-Chair of EPIA 2011.

My research focus on the understanding of human rationality in a situational context, to the point we can design and deploy societies of artificial agents to study complex phenomena, in particular, social phenomena. In a realistic setting, agents are the source of their own rationality (in the words of Herbert Simon, "people have reasons for what they do"). Putting several autonomous and self-interested agents together in a social context, the global outcome of the aggregate of individual behaviours becomes hard to understand, explain, predict. By using multi-agent-based simulation, and keeping the researchers and the stakeholders in the experimental loop, we may not be closer to the "truth" (whatever that might be), but can be better prepared to unforeseen contingencies not possible to envisage at design time, and have a better grasp of the consequences of the measures to be taken.