Edy Portmann has spent most of his life so far in Switzerland but has managed to live, work and study in Austria, Singapore and, although for a short time only, in Japan. Currently he lives with his wife, Eveline, and his little daughter, Shani, in California, United States, where he is employed as Postdoc at Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing at prestigious Cal. Together with the well-known Professors Zadeh and Agogino he works on the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project on Approximate Reasoning Methods for the Social Semantic Web.

In the past Edy studied economics, business, information systems, and computer sciences at various universities. As a consequence he holds a Bachelor's degree in Information Systems from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland, a Master's degree in Business and Economics from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Fribourg, also Switzerland. Besides he was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Keio-NUS CUTE Center at the National University of Singapore, where he worked during summer 2010.

During his studies Edy worked in several Swiss organizations in study-related disciplines as Link Market Research Institute, where he was a Supervisor, Swisscom Mobile, where he operated as a Contract Manager, PricewaterhouseCoopers, where Edy worked as Business Analyst, and Ernst & Young, where he was an IT-Auditor for a large Swiss bank. In addition to his prior employment at the University of Fribourg, until end of 2010, he was also a Researcher at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Besides, he is co-founder of Mediamatics, a research think thank around Multimedia and Informatics.

Edy is a multi-talented, trans-disciplinary academic who interacts regularly with industries, universities and creative communities. In doing so his research interests include Human-Computer Information Retrieval, Mediamatics, and Soft Computing. Besides Edy is member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, the World Federation on Soft Computing, and the Web of Things.