IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award

This award was started for dissertations defended in 2006 and is named for Professor Victor Lesser, a long standing member of the AAMAS community who has graduated a large number of outstanding PhD students in the area. To be eligible for the 2014 award, a dissertation had to have been written as part of a PhD defended during the year 2014, and had to be nominated by the supervisor with three supporting references. Selection is based on originality, depth, impact and written quality, supported by quality publications. Previous winners of this award were Manish Jain (2013), Birgit Endrass (2012), Daniel Villatoro (2011), Bo An (2010), Andrew Gilpin (2009), Ariel Procaccia (2008), Radu Jurca (2007), and Vincent Conitzer (2006).

The 2014 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award recipient is Dr. Yair Zick, whose thesis titled "Arbitration, Fairness and Stability: Revenue Division in Collaborative Settings" was supervised by Dr. Edith Elkind. The committee also wanted to recognise two other nominees (unordered): Dr. Tim Baarslag, whose thesis titled "What to Bid and When to Stop" was supervised by Prof. Catholijn Jonker and Dr. Koen Hindriks; and Dr. Xi (Alice) Gao, whose thesis titled "Eliciting and Aggregating Truthful and Noisy Information" was supervised by Assoc. Prof. Yiling Chen.