The ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

ACM SIGAI, in collaboration with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, in 2000 has instituted 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 SIGAI from the proceeds of previous Autonomous Agents conferences. Prior to 2014, it was known as the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Award. Read more about the award at the ACM awards site.

Nominations are solicited for the 2022 ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award. This award is made for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. It 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 SIGAI from the proceeds of previous Autonomous Agents conferences. The recipient of the award will receive a monetary prize and a certificate, and will be invited to present a plenary talk at the AAMAS 2022 conference in Auckland, New Zealand.

The call for awards is published annually in the fall.

How to Nominate

Anyone can make a nomination. Nominations should be made by email to the chair of the award committee, Manuela Veloso (mmv@cs.cmu.edu), and should consist of a short (< 1 page) statement that emphasizes not only the research contributions that the individual has made that merit the award but also how the individual’s current work is an important influence on the field.

NOTE: a candidate can only be considered for the award if they are explicitly nominated. If you believe that someone deserves the award, then NOMINATE THEM -- don't assume that somebody else will!

Important Dates

• November 15, 2021 -- Deadline for nominations
• December 15, 2021 -- Announcement of winner
• May 9-13 2022 -- AAMAS-2022 conference in Auckland, New Zealand

Winner of 2021 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Professor Vincent Conitzer is the recipient of the 2021 award. Professor Conitzer is the Distinguished University Professor of New Technologies and Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, as well as Head of Technical AI Engagement at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy, at the University of Oxford. His highly cited work in multi-agent systems spans interdisciplinary areas in game theory, social choice, and economics. Specifically, he has made foundational contributions to the field of computational social choice, helped to define the field of automated mechanism design, and provided complexity results on Nash equilibrium as well as leader-follower games. Professor Conitzer has served the autonomous agents research community in a variety of capacities, including as AAMAS program chair, EC program chair, AIES program chair, and AAAI program chair. He was also a founding editor of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation.

Winner of 2020 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Professor Munindar Singh is the recipient of the 2020 award. Professor Singh is the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. This award acknowledges his extensive contributions to our understanding of social interaction and autonomy in Artificial Intelligence through his foundational work on interaction protocols, norms, and trust in multiagent systems. This work pioneered new approaches to thinking about sociotechnical systems in a formal and verifiable manner. The broad impact of the work has extended far beyond the agent community to encompass concerns in service-oriented computing, software engineering, and distributed computing. In addition, Professor Singh has served the autonomous agents research community in a variety of roles, including as general chair of AAMAS 2005, a charter member of the editorial board of JAAMAS, and an IFAAMAS Board member

Winner of 2019 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Professor Carles Sierra is the recipient of the 2019 award. Professor Sierra is Vice-Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He has made foundational contributions to research on negotiation and argumentation, computational trust and reputation, and artificial social systems. His work has pursued answers to fundamental agent research questions: how to interact and with whom, and how to design frameworks for agent interaction. This work played a significant role in establishing the foundations for these questions and motivating further research across the community. Prof. Sierra has also served the autonomous agents research community in a variety of roles, including General Chair of the AAMAS conference, its Program Chair and Editor in Chief of the JAAMAS journal.

Winner of 2018 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Craig Boutilier, Principal Research Scientist at Google, is the recipient of the 2018 award. Over the years, Dr. Boutilier has made foundational contributions to research on decision-making under uncertainty, game theory, and computational social choice. He is a pioneer in applying decision-theoretic concepts in novel ways in a variety of domains including (single- and multi-agent) planning and reinforcement learning, preference elicitation, voting, matching, facility location, and recommender systems. His recent research continues to significantly influence the field of computational social choice through the novel computational and methodological tools he introduced and his focus on modeling realistic preferences. In addition to his reputation for outstanding research, Dr. Boutilier is also recognized as an exceptional teacher and mentor.

Winner of 2017 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. David Parkes of Harvard University is the recipient of the 2017 award. Prof. Parkes' research has explored a variety of topics in multiagent systems and economics. His early work on combinatorial auctions made fundamental contributions to the theory of the field; other pioneering early work includes an influential synthesis of MDPs and mechanism design, a formalism for incentive-aligned, distributed mechanism design, and the development of market-based methods for resource allocation in sensor networks. Recent research of Prof. Parkes has applied machine learning to produce new results and techniques for human computation, mechanism design, and social choice. He has also provided sustained service to the Multiagent Systems and EconCS communities in key leadership roles.

Winner of 2016 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Peter Stone of the University of Texas at Austin is the recipient of the 2016 award. Prof. Stone's work is exceptional in both its breadth and depth in multiagent systems. Some of his most influential work has been in reinforcement learning and multiagent learning as applied to robot soccer, autonomous traffic management, and trading agents. His contributions are ongoing, as evidenced by the growing influence of one of his recent innovations, the formulation of ad hoc teamwork as a new research area. In addition to the impact of his research, his teams' successes in international competitions, including RoboCup and the Trading Agent Competition, are particularly notable. Prof. Stone has also served the multiagent systems, AI, and RoboCup communities in various leadership roles.

Winner of 2015 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

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 foundational 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.

Winner of 2014 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Michael Wellman of the University of Michigan is the recipient of the 2014 award. Prof. Wellman has had a profound and broad impact across an array of research challenges in autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Prof. Wellman's contributions range from his pioneering work that helped introduce economic paradigms in multiagent systems, to significant contributions to computational game theory and electronic commerce, including mechanism design and market-based systems. Additionally, Prof. Wellman played an instrumental role in launching the annual Trading Agent Competition (TAC), one of the oldest and most well-known research competitions in multi-agent systems.

Winner of 2013 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2013 award is Professor Jeffrey S. Rosenschein (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel). Professor Rosenschein is honoured for his pioneering work on the use of game theory in multi-agent systems. Among Professor Rosenschein's many contributions in this area are techniques for automated negotiation, computational social choice, multi-agent planning, and mechanism design in computational settings. In addition, Professor Rosenschein has a substantial track record of community service, having been general co-chair for the AAMAS conference in 2003, president of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS), and serving as co-editor-in-chief for the journal "Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems".

Winner of 2012 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2012 award is Professor Moshe Tennenholtz (Technion/Microsoft Research Israel). Professor Tennenholtz is honoured for his substantial and sustained contributions to the foundations of multi-agent systems. His contributions range from the first formal studies of social laws for multi-agent systems, through contributions to the computational theory of auctions, multi-agent learning, computational social choice theory, reputation and ranking systems, and the notion of program equilibrium. In addition, Prof Tennenholtz has a substantial track record of outstanding community service, including serving as an editor-in-chief of JAIR: the Journal of AI Research.

Winner of 2011 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2011 award is Professor Joe Halpern of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Professor Halpern is honoured for his substantial and enormously influential contributions to the logical foundations of multi-agent systems, in particular, the computational foundations and applications of epistemic logic and reasoning under uncertainty.

Winners of 2010 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Jonathan Gratch and Prof. Stacy Marsella from the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies are the joint recipients of the 2010 award. Prof. Marsella and Prof. Gratch have made significant and sustained contributions to autonomous agents and multiagent systems in the area of virtual agents, in particular in emotion modeling and social simulation. Their agent models have vastly contributed to the field of embodied conversational agents. Their work balances theoretical and engineering achievements, allowing the understanding of the factors and processes underlying how emotion affects behaviors. They have also proposed a novel way to validate computational models of human emotions. Their work has been applied to large projects in multiple application domains such as interactive drama and serious games. Prof. Marsella has served the autonomous agents research community, in a variety of ways, including chairing the Virtual agent track of the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010). Prof. Gratch is the current president of the Humaine Association for Research on Emotions and Human-Machine Interaction as well as the founding editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. They have won the Best Innovative System/Application Paper Award at the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2003).

Winner of 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Manuela M. Veloso of Carnegie Mellon University is the recipient of the 2009 award. Prof. Veloso has made significant and sustained contributions to Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in the areas of planning and control learning in multi-agent systems. Prof. Veloso's research is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the effective construction of teams of robot agents where cognition, perception, and action are seamlessly integrated to address planning, execution, and learning tasks. She has made significant contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, planning by analogical reuse, and more recently, robot learning from demonstration. Her research contributions have also been realized concretely in the form of teams of robot soccer playing agents that have won several international championships at the annual RoboCup robot soccer competitions. Her impact and visibility has been consistently high over the past two decades for her technical contributions, for her impressive robot teams, and for her leadership within the research community.

Winner of 2008 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 foundational 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.

Winner of 2007 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof Sarit Kraus, of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, is the recipient of the 2007 award. Prof Kraus is well known for her work on formal models of multi-agent systems. In particular, she pioneered the development of techniques for computational negotiation, automated coalition formation, cooperative search, and the logical formalization of cooperation and multi-agent shared plans. She has also made significant and lasting contributions to the wider field of AI, in areas such as search and non-monotonic reasoning.

In addition to her substantial research contributions, Prof Kraus has served the autonomous agents research community in many ways. She was PC chair of the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS2000), and general co-chair of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS2005). She has been an associate editor of the AAMAS journal since its founding, and an editor of AI Journal since 2000. Sarit is also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland.

Winner of 2006 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Wooldridge of the University of Liverpool, UK is the recipient of the 2006 award. Dr. Wooldridge has made significant and sustained contributions to the research on autonomous agents and multi agent systems. In particular, Dr. Wooldridge has made foundational contributions to the logical foundations of multi-agent systems, especially to formal theories of cooperation, teamwork and communication, computational complexity in multi-agent systems, and agent-oriented software engineering. In addition to his substantial research contributions, Dr. Wooldridge has served the autonomous agents research community, in a variety of ways including foundin g of the AgentLink Network of Excellence in 1997 and most recently as the Technical Program co-chair of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS2005).

Winner of 2005 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Milind Tambe of the University of Southern California is the recipient of the 2005 award. Dr. Tambe has made significant and sustained contributions to the research on autonomous agents and multi agent systems. In particular, Dr. Tambe made foundational contributions to the theory, applications, and software infrastructure in the area of teamwork, which has become a flourishing research area in multi agent systems. In addition to his substantial research contributions, Dr. Tambe has served the autonomous agents research community, in a variety of ways most recently as the General co-chair of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS2004).

Winner of 2004 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The selection committee for the SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Makoto Yokoo of the NTT Communication Science Laboratories is the recipient of the 2004 award. Dr. Yokoo has made significant and sustained contributions to the research on autonomous agents and multi agent systems. In particular, Dr. Yokoo made foundational contributions to the area of distributed constrain satisfaction, which has become a flourishing research area in multi agent systems. Dr. Yokoo has also contributed to the areas of mechanism design in anonymous environments and secure protocols for combinatorial optimization problems. In addition to his substantial research contributions, Dr. Yokoo has served the autonomous agents research community, most recently as a Technical Program co-chair of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent systems (AAMAS 2003) and has been a leading figure in the autonomous agents community in Japan and Asia/Pacific Rim.

Winner of 2003 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

Prof. Jennings has undertaken a broad research agenda that continues to have a broad impact on the agent research community. His work is consistently among the most frequently cited agent researchers, both within the agent research community and in the computer science literature in general. He has developed a number of agent-based applications in a variety of domains. Furthermore, the Gaia methodology for agent-based software engineering, which he developed with Michael Wooldridge, is well recognized in the field. In addition, Prof. Jennings has made contributions to areas of automated negotiation and combinatorial auctions. Prof. Jennings has also been active in other technical areas that overlap with agent research, such as the semantic Web and grid computing. Prof. Jennings has had good success in promoting the transfer of agent-based methods into industry. He acts as chief scientist at Lost Wax, and consults on a number of commercial agent projects. We believe that his efforts have helped fuel commercial interest in agent-based techniques.

Winner of 2002 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

Katia Sycara of Carnegie Mellon University has been awarded the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for 2002. Dr. Sycara has made significant contributions to a number of subareas of agent research, including agent architectures, middle agents, and multi-agent negotiation. She has played a major role in organizing the Journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and the International Conferences on Autonomous Agents. In recognition of this award, Dr. Sycara gave an address at the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, in Bologna, Italy, July 17-19, 2002. The title of her presentation was "Agents Supporting Humans and Organizations in Open, Dynamic Environments."

Winner of 2001 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award

The winner of the 2001 award is Tuomas Sandholm, of Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Sandholm has conducted an intensive research program in electronic markets and multi-agent systems, and has also done work in other areas of autonomous agents. The breadth and depth of his contributions over a relatively short period of time are impressive. In addition, he has been an active contributor to the Autonomous Agents community, contributing regularly to the AA conference since its inception. In recognition of this award, Dr. Sandholm presented an invited lecture at the 2001 International Conference on Autonomous Agents. The title of his presentation was "Agents in Combinatorial Markets."