Edmund Durfee is professor of information and professor of electrical engineering and computer science. His Ph.D. research developed an approach for planning coordinated actions and interactions in a network of distributed artificial intelligence problem-solving systems, and is described in his book, Coordination of Distributed Problem Solvers (Kluwer Academic Press)

His research interests are in distributed artificial intelligence, planning, cooperative robotics, and real-time problem solving. A central application of his work is to artificial agents in information networks such as digital libraries, where the changing population of information collections and services makes flexible teaming of agents a central concern. His teaching interests are in artificial intelligence, research methodology, and fundamental issues in computation.

Durfee was a 1991 recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation to support this work, and was an invited speaker at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1992. He is an associate editor for Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems Journal, and was the conference chair for the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems in July, 2000. He is a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM.