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ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Yoav Shoham of Stanford University is the recipient of the 2008 award. Prof. Shoham has made significant and sustained contributions to Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in the areas of logic and game theory. He has made contributions on logics of knowledge and belief and on non-monotonic logic. He has proposed techniques of belief revision and importantly for MAS, a theory of belief fusion. He defined the framework for Agent Oriented Programming that represented a programming view of those theoretical notions studied. The paper describing AOP and published in 1993 is still one of the most cited papers on Agents research. His research on Game Theory includes seminal work on combinatorial auctions and on several topics on mechanism design. He performed early work on Social Laws and Conventions. He has proposed algorithms and test beds (CATS and GAMUT) that are widely used. On the practical side, he has founded two successful companies in the eCommerce industry. Overall, his research covers formal and practical aspects, and the impact of his work has been consistently very high for the last fifteen years.

About the Award

ACM SIGART, in collaboration with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, has instituted an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. Award winners receive an honorarium and are invited to give a talk at the annual Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) Conference. This award is specifically intended to recognize researchers whose current research is influencing the field. Award candidates are evaluated based on the quality and significance of their research contributions over the last five years. It is expected that at least some of these contributions should have been reported at one or more Autonomous Agents or AAMAS conferences. Previous winners of the ACM SIGART Autonomous Research Award were Sarit Kraus (2007), Michael Wooldridge (2006), Milind Tambe (2005), Makoto Yokoo (2004), Nicholas Jennings (2003), Katia Sycara (2002), and Tuomas Sandholm (2001).

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