Pascal Niedermeier

Research

Pascal works on the substrate side of negotiation: what primitives should the substrate expose so that multi-agent negotiation can be conducted at the level of explicit commitments and constraints rather than implicit dialogue. He is one of the contributors who pushed for the substrate's commitments object to be first-class.

He has been with alphabell since 2018 and has worked on every iteration of the agent substrate. He is on the formal review of the v2 substrate design that mira-holloway is leading.

Pascal works primarily from Zurich and contributes to the cell-formation review pool. He is one of the contributors who insists on extensive comment periods on substrate-level proposals; cell-formation proposals that touch the substrate routinely run two-week comment periods at his suggestion.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, ETH Zurich, 2014.

Prior to alphabell: ETH Zurich; Constellation; Praxis AI Studies.

Selected publications

• Apr 2025 · ab-agent-negotiat
  Negotiation Protocols Among Heterogeneous Agents: a benchmark and three baselines
  Roman Iliescu, Yvonne Akande, Lakshmi Ravi, Pascal Niedermeier
• Oct 2025 · ab-durable-agents
  Durable Agent Substrate v1: persistent state, learned tool affordances, and verifiable execution traces
  Mira Holloway, Dineth Karunaratne, Priya Anand, Cheung Wai-Lin
• Oct 2024 · ab-federated-comp
  A Federated Compute Scheduler for an Asynchronous Research Lab
  Pranav Iyer, Yusra Habibi, Akoss Vidor
• Sep 2025 · ab-scalable-overs
  Scalable Oversight for Multi-Step Agent Systems: a Debate-Plus-Trace Approach
  Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard, Hiroshi Tanigawa, Maral Lotfi, Ruth Wernicke
• Sep 2024 · ab-interpretabili
  Interpretability Cell Pairing: how every dual-use capability run gets a watchful sibling
  Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove, Yuki Cho

Full publications index →

Recent talks

• Substrates as a multi-agent contract, AAMAS 2024
• How to evaluate a negotiation protocol, IJCAI 2024