Leon van der Torre
Leon van der Torre, born 18 March 1968 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, is a professor of computer science at the University of Luxembourg and head of the Individual and Collective Reasoning (ICR) group within the Computer Science and Communication Research Unit. He is a leading researcher in deontic logic and multi-agent systems and serves on the university’s Ethics Advisory Committee. Since March 2016 he has been the head of the Computer Science and Communication (CSC) Research Unit.
Education and career: He studied computer science (and philosophy) at Erasmus University Rotterdam, earning an MSc in 1992 and a PhD in computer science in 1997 under Yao-Hua Tan. His thesis focused on deontic logic and defeasibility in preference-based deontic logic. He has held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Saarbrücken), CNRS-IRIT (Toulouse), CWI Amsterdam, and Vrije Universiteit, and joined the University of Luxembourg as a full professor for Intelligent Systems in January 2006. By 2015, 12 of his PhD students had completed their doctorates and 10 of his postdocs had obtained permanent research or teaching positions.
Research and contributions: He helped develop the BOID agent architecture, created the area of input/output logics, and developed a game-theoretic approach to normative multi-agent systems. He initiated workshops on coordination and organization (CoOrg), roles (ROLES), and normative multi-agent systems (NORMAS). He is an editor and board member for several journals in deontic logic and normative systems and was named an ECCAI Fellow in 2015.
Personal life: He has been married to artist Egberdien van der Torre – van der Peijl since 2000, and they have two sons.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:42 (CET).