George Rzevski Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors

George is an academic, entrepreneur and consultant. He is Professor Emeritus, Department of Design and Innovation at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK and Visiting Professor of Multi-Agent Systems at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Germany and Moratuwa University, Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he is involved in a number of advanced research projects in the fields of Complexity and Multi-Agent Systems.

At Emergent Intelligence Technology, Inc, he is actively involved in developing the 3rd generation of multi-agent technology for the USA market, overseeing consulting assignments and leading courses on complexity science and multi-agent technology.

In 1999, together with Petr Skobelev, he founded Magenta Corporation Ltd, London, UK and Samara, Russia, where he worked until 2007, first as Chairman and Chief Executive and later as Chief Scientist, leading design and development of large-scale multi-agent systems for applications such as real-time logistics, dynamic data mining, knowledge discovery and semantic search. He has three patents related to agent-based software.

Before founding Magenta Corporation, George was Lucas Professor in Department of Design and Innovation at The Open University, Milton Keynes, where he was also Director, Centre for the Design of Intelligent Systems. His Centre was well funded by grants from government and industry and his Department was rated 5 out of 5 in the two Research Assessment Exercises. As a tribute to his successful research career, the University established recently a new “The George Rzevski Complexity Science Laboratory”. At The Open University George pioneered undergraduate education in intelligent mechatronics launching a course in which every student experimented with his/her personal intelligent robot.

Professor Rzevski has published widely and delivered keynote papers at numerous international conferences. He supervised PhD projects and acted as external examiner for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in many university departments. Until recently he has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, published by Elsevier. He assessed candidates for tenure on behalf of a number of American universities, including Stamford, Ohio and Texas and examined over 30 PhD students from various universities, including Cambridge University, Imperial College, London School of Economics, Royal College of Art, Cardiff University, Singapore University, and National University of Ireland. For several years George delivered a regular series of lectures on Economic, Social and Cultural Implications of the Internet to postgraduate students at London School of Economics.

Throughout his academic career George worked as a consultant for private companies, government administrations and European Union on various issues related to advanced information technologies.

He began his academic career in the UK at Kingston Polytechnic, later Kingston University, where he was Professor and Founder Head of Information Systems. At Kingston he launched new undergraduate and postgraduate courses aimed at bringing together disciplines of Information Technology (IT) and Business and led a successful research centre in Computer-Integrated Manufacturing. The Centre worked in close cooperation with leading high-technology companies, including ICL, Xerox, IBM and many others.

George is of Russian origin. His family emigrated from Russia in 1918 and settled in Serbia, where he was born in 1932 and educated at the University of Belgrade.

In his late twenties he was given an opportunity to establish a new design office in Belgrade. He hand-picked his staff employing only talented young engineers and the design office grew under his leadership into a major organization capable of undertaking large-scale electrical engineering projects. At the age of 29 George was Chief Designer of all major railways electrification schemes in former Yugoslavia.

George moved to the UK in the 1960s where he attended a postgraduate refresher course at Imperial College before joining Kingston. He is now at home both in the UK and US.