About

Dr. Héctor Muñoz-Avila is a professor in the department of Computer Science & Engineering at Lehigh University. Muñoz-Avila returned to Lehigh in July 2025 after serving as Program Director at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division, where he was cluster lead for the Information Integration and Informatics (III) program. He is recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER and paper awards and held a Lehigh Class of 1961 Professorship. He has been chair for various international scientific meetings including the Sixth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR-05) and the twenty-fifth Innovative Applications of AI Conference (IAAI-13). Dr. Muñoz-Avila served as a program director for Robust Intelligence at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where he managed the AI and ML portfolios and co-spearheaded efforts related to self-monitoring systems. He is/has been funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Muñoz-Avila's research focuses on integrated AI, combining statistical machine learning techniques, symbolic planning and other reasoning techniques with the aim of high-level (e.g., cognitive) capabilities that are greater than the sum of its individual parts. He has a broad range of interests in different areas including agents introspectively reasoning about their own actions (i.e., cognitive systems), generalizing and abstracting episodic knowledge into general domain knowledge (i.e., machine learning), adapting to changes in the environment (i.e., agents), learning episodic knowledge and using this knowledge to solve new problems (i.e., planning). A common trait of his research interests is that he frequently works on problems that involve integrating some of these areas as opposed to working on problems that can be circumscribed within any one sole area. He frequently works with researchers both in AI and in other areas including digital games, civil engineering, electrical engineering, cognitive psychology, education, and manufacturing.

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