Our dear friend and colleague Armando Robles passed away on the fifth of May in his native Monterrey, Mexico.

The last time we heard of Armando was last February when we at the IIIA thanked him for his generous contribution to IJCAI 2011 organization. He then mentioned that recent life had been bumpy but everything was back to normal. Sadly, normal it will be no more and his loss will weigh heavy on the heart of his friends; some of which he left in the IIIA. Because Armando made a big impression on us at the IIIA. Not only because he was this eccentric entrepreneur who had the daring to become a scientist, this restless Mexican who, of all places, chose Barcelona to set his camp and the IIIA to prime his skills, this athlete who programed in C and in JAVA. The big impression that he made on us ---and will last--- is that of a good man who took life seriously and shared his enthusiasm with the simplicity of a child.

Armando was a successful businessman who ran his own software company, Grupo TCA with over a hundred collaborators. Grupo TCA is specialized in vertical market applications, namely in hotel, hospital and retail integrated systems, with clients in the US, México and South America, Europe and Asia. TCA had developed stand-alone applications, web-based services and back-office support with systems that could be tailored to clients with different degrees of sophistication and complexity, from hotel chains with thousands of rooms to family run convenience stores.

With a keen eye on competition, Armando realized that in order to survive and grow, his company needed to incorporate leading edge technology. In 2005 he reorganized the company to allow himself the time and freedom to look for available solutions and develop a strategy and whatever technology might be required to give his company a substantive competitive advantage. Not a man for half-way efforts he enrolled in the Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) PhD program in AI and after prospecting state of the art technologies settled for multiagent systems. For this reason, he came to the IIIA to do research on electronic institutions. In fact he developed an extension to the core model in order to reengineer his legacy systems of more than one million lines of code. In Armando's proposal a conventional service-oriented architecture was intensively agentified and electronic institutions were used to represent and enact flexible business processes. The implementation of these ideas in his hotel management system deserved the "Best industrial Software" award in the AAMAS 09 conference in Budapest.

Armando spent almost a year, full-time, at the institute in 2006 and then kept on coming back repeatedly for shorter visits until he read his PhD. thesis in 2008. In this period he was fully integrated to the Institute's way of life except for one significant aspect: he also found time to oversee his business. Almost every night he would contact his office and while keeping a tab on everyday company matters, he was also leading the reengineering process that upgraded their production system to the fully agentifed version in record time. A serious sportsman he biked in the hills near Casteldefells. An affectionate family man he was in constant touch with his wife and daughters and even brought them to spend some time here. Such expressions of discipline, effectiveness and fidelity to priorities he complemented with a merry disposition, empathy, openness and generosity. Not surprisingly, we found in him a good and trustworthy friend. One that we shall dearly miss.