PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jochen Renz

Jochen Renz is a computer scientist at the Australian National University whose research covers knowledge representation, spatial reasoning and AI for open-world novelty. They earned a PhD at Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg in 2000, and a 1997 IJCAI paper with Bernhard Nebel showed that reasoning in the RCC-8 region connection calculus is NP-complete in general and identified a maximal tractable subset of its relations. After postdoctoral posts in Sweden and Austria and a researcher job at NICTA in Sydney, they joined ANU in 2006, headed its Artificial Intelligence Group from 2011 to 2020 and became a professor in 2014. In 2012, they organized an Angry Birds AI competition in Sydney, and from 2019 to 2023 they used Angry Birds as a physical environment for a DARPA SAIL-ON project on open-world novelty. They are a professor in the ANU School of Computing, where they organize the Angry Birds AI Competition and the Angry Birds Level Generation Competition.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 1996–2000

    Degrees in Ulm and Freiburg

    They earn a master's degree in computer science at the University of Ulm in 1996 and a PhD at Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg in 2000.

  2. 1997

    Complexity of the region connection calculus

    Their 1997 IJCAI paper with Bernhard Nebel explores the boundary between polynomial and NP-hard reasoning in the Region Connection Calculus RCC-8. It proves that reasoning is NP-complete in general and identifies a maximal tractable subset of the relations that contains all base relations.

  3. 2000–2006

    Postdoc years, then NICTA Sydney

    They work as a postdoc at the WITAS lab of the University of Linköping in Sweden in 2000, then as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at DBAI, TU Vienna, from 2001 to 2003. In 2003, they complete a habilitation in information systems at TU Vienna, and from 2003 to 2006 they are a researcher at NICTA in Sydney.

  4. 2006–2014

    From ANU fellow to professor

    They join the Australian National University in 2006 as a fellow, become an associate professor in 2009, hold an ARC Future Fellowship from 2010 to 2014, and become a professor in 2014.

  5. 2012–2015

    The Angry Birds AI competition

    In 2012, the ANU Artificial Intelligence Group, which they head from 2011 to 2020, hosts a Sydney competition that pits AI programs against humans at Angry Birds. In 2015, their AAAI paper describes the competitions held with AI 2012, IJCAI 2013 and ECAI 2014 and explains why the game is a hard problem and an important step towards AI that can interact with the real world.

  6. 2019–2023

    DARPA SAIL-ON novelty project

    From 2019 to 2023, they are principal investigator of the ANU project Novelty Characterization and Generation in a Physical Environment, part of DARPA's SAIL-ON program, which uses Angry Birds as a semi-realistic physical environment to study AI for open-world novelty. In 2021, they coauthor with Vimukthini Pinto, Cheng Xue, Chathura Nagoda Gamage and Matthew Stephenson a paper that proposes a qualitative physics-based method to quantify how hard novelties are to detect in Angry Birds.

  7. 2024–2025

    NovPhy and ChatGPT4PCG 2

    In 2024, they coauthor NovPhy, a benchmark in the journal Artificial Intelligence that tests whether AI agents can detect and adapt to eight novelties across five physical scenarios, and the ChatGPT4PCG 2 competition paper on prompt engineering for Science Birds level generation at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Games. In 2025, the IJCAI Journal Track reprints the NovPhy abstract.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor in ANU School of Computing

    They are a professor in the Intelligent Systems cluster of the ANU School of Computing and organize the Angry Birds AI Competition and the Angry Birds Level Generation Competition. Their research interests include knowledge representation, spatial reasoning and AI for open-world novelty.

Career

  1. Since 2006Australian National UniversityFellow, Associate professor
  2. 2003–2006National ICT AustraliaResearcher
  3. 2001–2003TU WienMarie Curie postdoctoral fellow
  4. 2000Linköping UniversityPostdoctoral researcher

Education

  1. 2000University of FreiburgPhD
  2. 1996Universität UlmMaster's degree

From the biography.

  1. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Australian National University. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Australian National University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Australian National University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Australian National University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jochen Renz yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Jochen Renz | ANU School of Computing comp.anu.edu.au. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. On the Complexity of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: A Maximal Tractable Fragment of the Region Connection Calculus | ML Anthology mlanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Jochen Renz - The Australian National University researchportalplus.anu.edu.au. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. AI boffins take on Angry Birds theregister.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. AIBIRDS: The Angry Birds Artificial Intelligence Competition | Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence ojs.aaai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. The Difficulty of Novelty Detection in Open-World Physical Domains: An Application to Angry Birds arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. NovPhy: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Open-World AI Systems Author Links Open Overlay Panel (Abstract Reprint) | IJCAI ijcai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. ChatGPT4PCG 2 Competition: Prompt Engineering for Science Birds Level Generation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.