John Collins

My research interests are centered around economic behavior and decision-making in autonomous agents. My current focus is Power TAC, a rich competitive simlation of retail electric power markets, which I lead along with Wolf Ketter of Erasmus University in Rotterdam. I am chief architect and project manager for the software infrastructure of Power TAC, which is hosted on github and distributed through maven central.

I have been Game Master and Operations Chair for the Supply-Chain Trading Agent Competition, and I have chaired the TADA workshop and the overall Trading Agent Competition in 2011. Maria Gini and I lead the MinneTAC research group, which has participated in the TAC-SCM games from their inception in 2003. I am also involved in the MAGNET project, focused on plan execution by an autonomous agent in an open market-oriented environment.

In addition to teaching undergrad and graduate courses in Computer Science, I teach in the Master of Science in Software Engineering program at the University of Minnesota.

I have also been an independent consultant, working in the areas of distributed systems architecture and design, software process, and project management. You can contact me by email at , or by phone at 612.625.0331.

gpg public key