Marc Torrens, PhD

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. SCIENCE, BUSINESS, SOCIETY.

Marc Torrens, PhD

Iconomic Systems, my first startup!

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Back in 1999, a group of crazy scientists and entrepreneurs (Prof. Boi Faltings, Dr. Pearl Pu, Dr. Christian Frei, Andreas Güenthard and myself) founded Iconomic Systems, a spin-off of the EPFL, to create innovative software for business travelers on mobile platforms. I was serving the company as the CTO.

The company specialized in the development of distributed client/server architectures targeting complex constraint satisfaction problems. This architecture was the main focus of my PhD work. I was completing my PhD [1] in parallel to the work for this company. We published the research we were conducting to several conferences and journals [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Also, I had my first experiences protecting Intellectual Property which led to several patents [14][15].

It April 2001, the company got acquired by a German competitor, i:FAO Group GmbH. Iconomic Systems became the R&D center for i:FAO. Then, I was appointed the director of the i:FAO future lab. The I:FAO Group was later acquired by Amadeus in 2014.

Here you have a taste of what we built a decade ago!

Screenshot of Iconomic Systems product
Screenshot of Iconomic Systems product
Screenshot of Iconomic Systems product
Screenshot of Iconomic Systems product
Screenshots of Iconomic Systems product to generate optimal traveler plans.

References

  1. Marc Torrens (2002): Scalable Intelligent Electronic Catalogs. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), 2002.
  2. Marc Torrens and Rainer Weigel and Boi Faltings (1998): Distributing Problem Solving on the Web Using Constraint Technology. In: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI'98)., pp. 42–49, IEEE Computer Society Press, Taipei, Taiwan, 1998, ISSN: 0-7803-5214-9.
  3. Marc Torrens and Boi Faltings (1999): SmartClients: Constraint satisfaction as a paradigm for scaleable intelligent information systems. In: AAAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce., pp. 10–15, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence AAAI Press, Orlando, FL, USA, 1999.
  4. Santiago Macho-Gonzalez and Marc Torrens and Boi Faltings (2000): A Multi-Agent Recommender System for Planning Meetings. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Autonomous Agents, ACM Press, 2000, ISBN: 978-1-58113-230-4.
  5. Marc Torrens and Boi Faltings (2001): Constraint Satisfaction for Modelling Scalable Electronic Catalogs. In: Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNAI 1991), no. LNAI 1991, pp. 214–228, 2001, ISBN: 3-540-41671-4.
  6. Marc Torrens and Boi Faltings and Pearl Pu (2002): Smart Clients: Constraint Satisfaction as a Paradigm for Scaleable Intelligent Information Systems. In: Constraints, vol. 7, iss. 1, pp. 49-69, 2002, ISSN: 1572-9354.
  7. Marc Torrens and Patrick Hertzog and Loic Samson and Boi Faltings (2003): reality: a Scalable Intelligent Travel Planner. Decision Support for the Business Traveler. In: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 623–630, ACM Press, Melbourne, Florida, USA, 2003, ISBN: 1-58113-624-2.
  8. Pearl Pu and Boi Faltings and Marc Torrens (2004): Effective Interaction Principles for Online Product Search Environments. In: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, pp. 724–727, IEEE Computer Society, Beijing, China, 2004, ISBN: 0-7695-2100-2.
  9. Patrick Hertzog and Marc Torrens and Pearl Pu (2004): Context-aware Computing for Business Traveler Care. In: Guimaraes, Nuno; Isaias, Pedro (Ed.): Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Applied Computing, ACM Press, Lisbon, Portugal, 2004, ISBN: 972-98947-3-6.
  10. Boi Faltings and Pearl Pu and Marc Torrens and Paolo Viappiani (2004): Designing Example-critiquing Interaction. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 22-29, ACM Press, Island of Madeira, Portugal, 2004, ISBN: 1-58113-815-6.
  11. Patrick Hertzog and Marc Torrens (2004): Context-aware Mobile Assistants for Optimal Interaction: a prototype for supporting the business traveler. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, pp. 256-258, ACM Press, 2004, ISBN: 1-58113-815-6.
  12. Marc Torrens and Patrick Hertzog and Pearl Pu and Boi Faltings (2004): Towards an Intelligent Mobile Travel Assistant. In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, ACM Press, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2004, ISBN: 1-58113-812-1.
  13. Boi Faltings and Marc Torrens and Pearl Pu (2004): Solution Generation with Qualitative Models of Preferences. In: Computational Intelligence, vol. 20, iss. 2, pp. 246-263, 2004, ISSN: 1467-8640.
  14. Boi Faltings and Marc Torrens (2003): Systems And Methods For Graphically Displaying Travel Information. US 2003/0033164 A1, 2003.
  15. Marc Torrens and Boi Faltings (2003): Approximative Methods For Searching Pareto Optimal Solutions In Electronic Configurable Catalogs. US 2003/0220847 A1, 2003.