Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning Group


The is a research group belonging to the Technical University of Catalonia – BarcelonaTech. It was founded by Prof. Ulises Cortés. The group has been active in the Artificial Intelligence field since 1986.
The main goal of this research group is the analysis, design, implementation and application of several Artificial Intelligence techniques, to support the operation or behaviour analysis of real-world complex systems or domains. Research is focused on the analysis, design, management or supervision of these domains, such as in the health and medical field, in environmental processes and systems, and in the industrial and enterprise sector.
Specific research efforts are undertaken in analysis and development of intelligent agents, understanding of coalition setting dynamics, social structure dynamics analysis, formal model construction for norms and conventions for e-commerce, information flow process design, temporal episode-based reasoning, experience-based argumentation techniques, hybrid methods in Statistics and Artificial Intelligence, belief or Bayesian networks, Case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, knowledge model identification and knowledge model building, knowledge representation, ontologies, social networks, semantic Web, Web services, and directory service study.
One of the major area of application-expertise is in the development of Environmental Decision Support Systems using Artificial Intelligence Techniques. In particular, since 1990 research has been done in the area of Urban Wastewater Treatment Plants, and more specifically on those that have as a technological basis the activated sludge.

Research lines

Their main research lines include:
These are the networks of excellence and thematic networks the group belongs to: