Prof Christer Carlsson, Director of the Institute of Advanced Management Systems Research, and a professor of management science at Abo Akademi University in Abo, Finland. He is a Fellow of the International Fuzzy Systems Association, an Honorary Member of the Austrian Society for Cybernetics and an Honorary Chairman of the Finnish Operations Research Society. He is in the Steering Group of the European Centre for Soft Computing in Oviedo, Spain and in the Steering Group of the BISC program at UC Berkeley.

Professor Carlsson got his DSc (BA) from Abo Akademi University in 1977, and has lectured extensively at various universities in Europe, in the U.S., in Asia and in Australia.

Professor Carlsson has organised and managed several research programs in industry in his specific research areas: knowledge based systems, decision support systems and soft computing, and has carried out theoretical research work also in multiple criteria optimisation and decision making, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, and cybernetics and systems research.

Some recent research programs, which include extensive industrial cooperation, include Smarter (reducing fragmentation of working time with modern information technology), SmartBulls, SoftLogs (eliminating demand fluctuations in the supply chain with fuzzy logic), Waeno (improving the productivity of capital in giga-investments using fuzzy real options), MetalIT (knowledge management and foresight in the metal industry), OptionsPort (optimal R&D portfolios where R&D projects are fuzzy real options), Imagine21 (foresight of new telecom services using agent technology), Chimer (mobile platforms for sharing the cultural heritage among European school children), AssessGrid (risk assessment and management for grid computing) and Enabling Technologies for Mobile Services (mobile technology based products and services with enabling technologies; a national Finnish research program with an international partner network in France, Germany, Austria, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and the USA).

He is on the editorial board of several journals including the Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, ITOR, Cybernetics and Systems, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Belgian Journal of Operational Research, Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Business and Group Decision and Negotiation.

He is the author of 4 books, and an editor or co-editor of 5 special issues of international journals and 12 books; he has published more than 230 papers. His most recent monographs are Fuzzy Reasoning in Decision Making and Optimization (with Robert Fullér), Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing Series, Springer-Verlag, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2002, and Fuzzy Logic in Management (with Mario Fedrizzi, Robert Fullér), Kluwer, Dordrecht 2003.