Awards

There are a number of awards associated with the AAMAS conference, some of which are known in advance, and some of which are announced at the conference.

ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. The award is intended to recognize researchers in autonomous agents whose current work is an important influence on the field. The award is an official ACM award, funded by an endowment created by ACM SIGART from the proceeds of previous Autonomous Agents conferences. Candidates for the award are nominated through an open nomination process. Previous winners of the SIGART Autonomous Research Award were Joe Halpern (2011), Jonathan Gratch and Stacy Marsella (2010), Manuela Veloso (2009), Yoav Shoham (2008), Sarit Kraus (2007), Michael Wooldridge (2006), Milind Tambe (2005), Makoto Yokoo (2004), Nick Jennings (2003), Katia Sycara (2002), and Tuomas Sandholm (2001).

The 2012 ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award recipient is Moshe Tennenholtz from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Microsoft Research Israel.

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 2011 award, a dissertation had to have been written as part of a PhD defended during the year 2011, 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 Bo An (2010), Andrew Gilpin (2009), Ariel Procaccia (2008), Radu Jurca (2007), and Vincent Conitzer (2006).

The 2011 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award recipient is Dr. Daniel Villatoro of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain (supervised by Prof. Jordi Sabater-Mir), with his dissertation “Social Norms for Self-Policing Multi-agent Systems and Virtual Societies”.

Special mention should also go to the runner-up, Dr. Albert Jiang of University of British Columbia (supervised by Prof. Kevin Leyton-Brown), for his thesis “Representing and Reasoning with Large Games”.

IFAAMAS Award for Influential Papers

The International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems set up an influential paper award in 2006 to recognize publications that have made seminal contributions to the field. Such papers represent the best and most influential work in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. These papers might, therefore, have proved a key result, led to the development of a new sub-field, demonstrated a significant new application or system, or simply presented a new way of thinking about a topic that has proved influential. The award is open to any paper that was published at least 10 years before the award is made. The paper can have been published in any journal, conference, or workshop. The award is sponsored by the Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages foundation.

The 2012 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award recipients are:

M.P. Wellman (1993) A market-oriented programming enviornment and its application to distributed multicommodity flow problems. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 1, pp.1-23.

M. Tambe (1997) Towards Flexible Teamwork. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 7, pp.83-124.

Previous awards are as follows:

2011

Y. Shoham (1993) Agent-oriented programming. Artificial Intelligence, 60, pp.51-92.

2010

M. Yokoo, E.H. Durfree, T. Ishida & K. Kuwabara (1998) The Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem: Formalization and Algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 10:673-685.

M. Yokoo & K. Hiriyama (1996) Distributed Breakout Algorithm for Solving Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems. Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-96), pp.401-408.

2009

M. N. Huhns. (Ed.) (1987) Distributed Artificial Intelligence. London, Pitman.

A. Bond and L. Gasser. (Eds.) (1988) Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. San Mateo, CA, Morgan Kaufmann.

L. Gasser and M. N. Huhns. (Eds.) (1989) Distributed Artificial Intelligence (Volume II). Pitman and Morgan Kaufmann.

2008

M. E. Bratman, D. J. Israel and M. E. Pollack (1988) Plans and resource-bounded practical reasoning. Computational Intelligence, 4, pages 349-355.

E. H. Durfee and V. Lesser (1991) Partial global planning: A coordination framework for distributed hypothesis formation. In: IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 21, pages 1167-1183.

2007

J. S. Rosenschein and M. R. Genesereth (1985) Deals Among Rational Agents. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Los Angeles , California , August 1985, pages 91-99.

A. Rao and M. Georgeff (1991) Modelling rational agents within a BDI-architecture. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Cambridge, Massachussets, pages 473-484.

B. J. Grosz and S. Kraus (1996) Collaborative Plans for Complex Group Actions. Artificial Intelligence, 86, pages 269-358.

2006

P. R. Cohen and H. Levesque (1990) Intention is choice with commitment. Artificial Intelligence , 42(2-3), pages 213-261.

R. Davis and R. Smith (1983) Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving. Artificial Intelligence, 20(1), pages 63-109.