Blazej “Blaz” Bulka is a Research Scientist at Clark & Parsia, LLC. He joined C & P in August 2009 after getting his PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He also holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.
His doctoral research focused on automated planning, shape of planning search spaces, and knowledge reuse between planning episodes. At UMBC, he was a part of MAPLE research group directed by Marie desJardins. He was involved in numerous research projects there; ranging from bioinformatics, to multi-agent systems, social networks, and data visualization. He co-authored multiple publications in these areas, including journal publications and award-winning conference papers. He also developed various software products: PSST (a fully-fledged PDDL-compliant state-space planner), UMBC AAIndex (web-based database and set of tools to visualize relationships among properties of amino acids), and support tools for assisting in school redistricting for Howard County Public School System.
In the past, Blazej worked as a Student Associate at SRI International’s Artificial Intelligence Center, where he was involved in developing their mixed-initiative hierarchical planning and scheduling system. Before coming to the United States in 2003, he spent a year at the DBS group (led by Prof. Peter Lockemann) at FZI in Karlsruhe, Germany. His stay at FZI was supported by the European Marie-Curie Fellowship, and during that time, Blazej was developing a distributed system for storing semantic knowlege. Earlier, during his Master’s studies in Poland, Blazej was concurrently researching software agent technology at the university and working for the software industry. During that time, he developed e-learning and e-commerce solutions, as well as maintained the internals of the operating systems and their compilers.
Blazej lives currently in Columbia, Maryland, and in his spare time, he explores the surrounding area by bicycle.
