AAMAS 09 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. The list of the awards to be made at AAMAS 2009 is as follows:

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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.

The 2009 ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award recipient is Prof. Manuela Veloso, from Carnegie Mellon University . She will present a plenary talk entitled "Teams of Robots: A Fascinating Multiagent Research Adventure".

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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 funded by the Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages foundation.

The 2009 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award is given to the series of edited collections of papers on Distributed AI published in the late 1980s:

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.

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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 2008 award, a dissertation had to have been written as part of a PhD defended during the year 2008, 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 Radu Jurca (2007) and Vincent Conitzer (2006).

The 2008 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award recipient is Ariel Procaccia for the dissertation entitled "Computational Voting Theory: Of the Agents, By the Agents, For the Agents". There will be an invited talk in the Conference, named "New Insights on Where to Locate a Library ", based on the awarded Phd thesis.

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Best Senior Program Committee member

This award is for a selected member of the Senior Program Committee based on outstanding contribution to the management of the paper selection process, including reviewing, encouraging discussion, obtaining extra reviews if needed, and dealing with any issues arising in the course of paper selection.

The AAMAS 2009 Best Senior Program Committee member was awarded to:

Edmund Durfee

Other nominees for this award were:

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni
Gerhard Weiss


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Best Program Committee member

This award is for a selected member of the Program Committee based on outstanding quality of reviews and discussion of papers.

The AAMAS 2009 Best Program Committee member was awarded to:

Nicolas Maudet

Other nominees for thsi award were:

Beatriz López Ibánez
Nir Oren


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Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award


The Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award is made annually at the AAMAS conference to the paper that is judged to be the best paper at the conference whose main author is registered as a student at the time of paper submission. Typically the student is registered for a PhD, although undergraduate and masters student papers may also be considered. The winning paper may have multiple authors, not all required to be students, but to be eligible, the main author of the paper must be a student. The award is named for Pragnesh Jay Modi (1975--2007), an active and influential member of the AAMAS research community who died tragically young in April 2007. Jay obtained his PhD from the University of Southern California in 2003, and at the time of his death was a junior faculty member at Drexel University , Philadelphia. Jay's PhD thesis has been foundational in the area of distributed constraint optimization (DCOP), and among his many accomplishments were an NSF-CAREER award and IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine's award for "AI's 10 to watch".

Nominations for the award are made by Program Committee members, Senior Program Committee members, Area Chairs and Program Chairs.

The AAMAS 2009 Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award was assigned to:

Increasing the Expressiveness of Virtual Agents--Autonomous Generation of Speech and Gesture for Spatial Description Tasks
Kirsten Bergmann, Stefan Kopp


Other nominees for this award were the following:

On the Significance of Synchroneity in Emergent Systems
Adam Campbell, Annie S. Wu

Caching Schemes for DCOP Search Algorithms
William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Sven Koenig

Decentralised Dynamic Task Allocation: A Practical Game-Theoretic Approach
Archie C. Chapman, Rosa Anna Micillo, Ramachandra Kota, Nicholas R. Jennings

Characterizing False-name-proof Allocation Rules in Combinatorial Auctions
Taiki Todo, Atsushi Iwasaki, Makoto Yokoo, Yuko Sakurai

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Best Paper Award

This award is for a selected paper which does not have a student as primary author. Nominations are made by Program Committee members, Senior Program Committee members, Area Chairs and Program Chairs.

The AAMAS 2009 Best Paper Award was assigned to:

Power in Normative Systems
Thomas Agotnes, Wiebe van der Hoek, Moshe Tennenholtz, Michael Wooldridge


Other nominees for this award were the following:

Effects of Resource and Remembering on Social Networks
Chung-Yuan Huang, Yu-Shiuan Tsai, Chuen-Tsai Sun

Investigating the Benefits of Automated Negotiations in Enhancing People's Negotiation Skills
Raz Lin, Yinon Oshrat, Sarit Kraus

Normative Framework for Normative System Change
Guido Boella, Gabriella Pigozzi, Leendert van der Torre

A Mathematical Analysis of Collective Cognitive Convergence
H. Van Dyke Parunak