2015

AAMAS 2015 Awards

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 Michael Wellman (2014), Jeffrey S. Rosenschein (2013), Moshe Tennenholtz (2012), 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 selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Catherine Pelachaud, Director of Research at CNRS at Telecom ParisTech is the recipient of the 2015 award. Dr. Pelachaud is honored for her sustained and substantial contributions to the area of intelligent virtual agents. Her seminal work in this area helped launch the area of intelligent virtual agents, and her many subsequent publications have exerted a strong influence on virtual agent research at AAMAS and the Intelligent Virtual Agents conferences. Furthermore, her research on the role that bodily communication plays in face-to-face interaction has helped set the agenda of embodied agent research. In the process, it has firmly established a research area of modeling the body, its relation to the mind and its role in social interaction. Overall, this work has filled critical gaps in agents research often ignored by the larger community.

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.

IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award

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.

This year's IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award winner is Prof. Michael Littman, in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the field as exemplified by the following influential paper:

Michael L. Littman. Markov games as a framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-94), New Brunswick, NJ, pp. 157-163, 1994.

Best Paper Nominations

The Dependence of Effective Planning Horizon on Model Accuracy (Page 1181)
Nan Jiang (University of Michigan)
Alex Kulesza (University of Michigan)
Satinder Singh (University of Michigan)
Richard Lewis (University of Michigan)

Efficient Decision-Making in a Self-Organizing Robot Swarm: On the Speed versus Accuracy Trade-Off (Page 1305)
Gabriele Valentini (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Heiko Hamann (University of Paderborn)
Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Dynamic Influence Maximization Under Increasing Returns to Scale (Page 949)
Haifeng Zhang (Vanderbilt University)
Ariel D. Procaccia (Carnegie Mellon University)
Yevgeniy Vorobeychik (Vanderbilt University)

Best Paper of the Innovative Applications Track Nominations

Improving the Performance of Mobile Phone Crowdsourcing Applications (Page 145)
Erfan Davami (University of Central Florida)
Gita Sukthankar (University of Central Florida)

A Mechanism for Smoothly Handling Human Interrupts in Team Oriented Plans (Page 377)
Alessandro Farinelli (University of Verona)
Nicolo Marchi (University of Verona)
Masoume M. Raeissi (University of Verona)
Nathan Brooks (Carnegie Mellon University)
Paul Scerri (Carnegie Mellon University)

HAC-ER: A Disaster Response System Based on Human-Agent Collectives (Page 533)
Sarvapali D. Ramchurn (University of Southampton)
Trung Dong Huynh (University of Southampton)
Yuki Ikuno (University of Southampton)
Jack Flann (University of Southampton)
Feng Wu (University of Southampton)
Luc Moreau (University of Southampton)
Nicholas R. Jennings (University of Southampton)
Joel E. Fischer (University of Nottingham)
Wenchao Jiang (University of Nottingham)
Tom Rodden (University of Nottingham)
Edwin Simpson (University of Oxford)
Steven Reece (University of Oxford)
Stephen J. Roberts (University of Oxford)

Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Nominations

Factored MDPS for Optimal Prosumer Decision-Making (Page 503)
Angelos Angelidakis (Technical University of Crete)
Georgios Chalkiadakis (Technical University of Crete)

Particle Field Optimization: A New Paradigm for Swarm Intelligence (Page 257)
Nathan Bell (Carleton University)
B. John Oommen (Carleton University)

Welfare Effects of Market Making in Continuous Double Auctions (Page 57)
Elaine Wah (University of Michigan)
Michael P. Wellman (University of Michigan)

Best Programme Committee Member Nominations

The nominees for Best Programme Committee member (in alphabetical order):
 
Sylvain Bouveret
Reshef Meir
Timothy Norman