Wolf Ketter appointed Professor of Next Generation Information Systems


<link people wolfgang-ketter _blank>Wolf Ketter has been appointed endowed Professor of Next Generation Information Systems at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). This new academic chair has been created to promote research into technologies that facilitate automated real-time decision-making.

The chair, endowed by the Erasmus Trust Fund and created on 1 July 2013, focuses on ‘disruptive’ and innovative technologies that facilitate real-time decision-making with the help of learning agents in business environments.

Learning agents are software entities that carry out operations on behalf of a user or organisation with some degree of independence or autonomy, are able to improve their performance from experience, and use some knowledge or representation of the user’s goals or needs.

One example is a decision-support system for auctioneers in the massive Dutch flower auction in Aalsmeer in the Netherlands, which sells 20 million flowers per day. The system gives recommendations in real time for starting price, minimum auction quantity, speed, and reserve price.

<link people wolfgang-ketter>Wolf Ketter is director of the <link research centres learning-agents>Learning Agents Research Group at Erasmus (LARGE) and the specialist research centre, <link research centres future-energy-business>the Erasmus Centre for Future Energy Business. Both research groups are based at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Significance of Future Energy

Explaining the significance of his research work, Prof. Ketter said: “The Erasmus Centre for Future Energy Business is focused on research, development, and application of new business models that enable the robust, intelligent, efficient, and sustainable energy networks of the future.

“The energy business is changing dramatically for two main reasons; first, active customer participation and second, volatile renewable energy resources. It’s a tricky business to balance the supply and demand of energy from renewable sources,” he added. “A new and more volatile landscape of renewable energy would need new concepts for balancing demand and supply, and for distribution, storage, and use in smart homes. The mindset of consumers is an additional factor.”

Wolf is founder and chair of the annual <link research centres future-energy-business erasmus-energy-forum erasmus-energy-forum-2013>Erasmus Energy Forum, held in Rotterdam. He has been president of the Association for Trading Agent Research (ATAR) since 2010, and leads the annual Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC). Since 2011 Wolf has also served as the chair of the IEEE Task Force on Energy Markets.

Overconsumption makes real dialogue and debate between industry, academia and politics necessary, he said. “By 2050, we will need about eight times the resources of one planet Earth. And as we don’t have that, we must change our behaviour. This is uncharted territory and it will require intense and sustained collaboration among business,  government, and science.”

“I think we’re ready to drive this change, to be open for new discussions and to enter the debate,” he said, but stipulated that professors, politicians and business people must be involved.

Erasmus Energy Forum 2013

About Wolf Ketter

Ketter earned his bachelor and master degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Applied University of Trier, Germany, and spent nine years in industry. He then went to the USA, where he earned another MSc in Software Engineering from the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota in 2000, and spent another two years in industry. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2007.

He has served as general chair or programme chair for more than 20 international conferences and workshops, and his research has been published in information systems and computer science journals such as AI Magazine, Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Energy Economics, Energy Policy, European Journal of Information Systems, OR/MS Today, Information Systems Research, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, and Machine Learning Journal.

He serves on the editorial board of the journals Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ) and Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE), and at Information Systems Research (ISR, starting from January 2014). In December 2012 he won the prestigious INFORMS Design Science Award and in June 2013 he won the runner-up award for the best European Information Systems research paper of the year.

For RSM, Prof. Ketter has developed new curricula in the areas of information systems, future energy business, and software engineering. He has also developed a new three-day executive education open programme, Future Energy Business, which will run for the first time in December 2013.