Professor Michael Thielscher is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. He received his postgraduate diploma in 1992 and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994, both with distinction, from Darmstadt University of Technology. He also completed his Habilitation in Computer Science at Darmstadt University of Technology, which was honored with the Award for Research Excellence by the university's alumni in 1998. Early in his career, he held positions as an Assistant Professor at Darmstadt University of Technology, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, and an Associate Professor at Dresden University of Technology. He joined UNSW as Professor in 2010 and served as an ARC Future Fellow from 2010 to 2014, Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University from 2011 to 2016, Associate Director at iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research from 2013 to 2016, and Interim Director at UNSW AI Institute from 2024 to 2025.
Thielscher's research focuses on Artificial General Intelligence, Cognitive Robotics, General Game Playing, Knowledge Representation, and Intelligent Agents. He has authored over 200 refereed papers and several books, including General Game Playing (Morgan & Claypool, 2014), Action Programming Languages (Morgan & Claypool, 2008), and Reasoning Robots: The Art and Science of Programming Robotic Agents (Springer, 2005). Key journal articles include "Game description language and dynamic epistemic logic compared" (Artificial Intelligence, 2021) and "General game playing with imperfect information" (Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2019). He co-authored the FluxPlayer system, which won the AAAI General Game Playing World Championship in 2006. In 2024, he was named the highest-ranked lifetime achievement scholar in Artificial Intelligence in Australia (41st worldwide) by ScholarGPS. He has held leadership roles including President of KR Inc. from 2020 to 2022, General Chair for KR'20, Program Co-Chair for AI'12, KI'14, and KR'18, and Program Chair for IJCAI-28.