José Rui Figueira took over as president of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision-Making at the International Conference of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision-Making, held from 2 to 7 June, in Tunisia. The Técnico professor was elected in 2019, having served as President Elected for the last four years.
“This new position requires a lot of responsibility”, he stressed at the end of 2019, within the context of his election.
Today he reaffirms the importance of this leadership for Técnico. ‘It’s always good to have someone from the Técnico community leading an International Society in this area. In practice, all problems are multi-criteria and decisions are increasingly being made based on a multi-dimensional analysis, even the AI tools in decision-making take into account this multi-dimensional aspect,’ he explains.
Professor José Rui Figueira’s goals as president include the commitment to the Society’s Awards and Conferences, the relationship with other societies working in the field of decision-making or related fields, as well as attracting new generations of researchers, increasing the number of members and fostering the dissemination of their results on the association’s platforms.
The International Society on MCDM aims to develop, test, evaluate and apply the appropriate methodology for solving multi-criteria decision-making problems, to support decision-makers and other actors in solving multi-criteria decision problems, to foster interaction and scientific research in the study of multi-criteria decision-making and to cooperate with other organisations in practice and also in the study of the management of these organisations management from a quantitative perspective.
Multicriteria decision support is an area of knowledge that uses analytical tools to support decision-makers throughout the decision-making process. José Rui Figueira’s research – at the Centre for Management Studies of Instituto Superior Técnico (CEGIST) – focuses on the choice problem and the design and experimentation of algorithms for combinatorial and multicriteria problems; the development of new methods, or improving existing ones, and new methodologies for ordering the total set of problems; and the development of new methodologies, methods, and algorithms for classification problems, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. The methodologies developed have been applied in various fields such as economics and management, medicine and health, energy, water resources, agriculture, urban planning and nanotechnologies.
In 2017, José Rui Figueira became the first Portuguese to receive the gold medal from the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision-Making for his theoretical and methodological contributions to the field throughout his career.
