Toru Ishida is a Professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University. Until 1993, he was a research scientist of NTT Laboratories. He spent some time at Columbia University, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Maryland, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Tsinghua University as a visiting scholar/professor. He has been working on autonomous agents and multiagent systems for twenty years. He proposed parallel rule firing, and extended it to distributed rule firing. Organizational self-design was introduced into distributed production systems for increasing adaptiveness. He also studies social informatics and running research projects related to community computing (or communityware), digital cities, and intercultural collaboration. He is a leader of the Language Grid project at NICT from 2006. His professional services include an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, an associate editor of Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, a co-editor in chief of Elsevier Journal on Web Semantics, a program co-chair of International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS'96), and a general co-chair of the first International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'02). He is a Fellow of IEEE and IPSJ.