[agents] IFAAMAS-12 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award

[Michael Winikoff]

This year eight PhD theses were nominated for the IFAAMAS-12 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. The nominees were of outstanding quality and made the choosing of a single winner extremely difficult. After extended discussions it was decided that the IFAAMAS-12 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award will have a winner and two explicit runners up.

The winner of this year's award is:

Dr. Birgit Endrass, whose thesis titled "Cultural Diversity for Virtual Characters: Investigating Behavioral Aspects across Cultures" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André
	
The two runners-up are:
	Dr. Bradley Knox, whose thesis titled "Learning from Human-Generated Reward" was supervised by Prof. Peter Stone
and
	Dr. Akshat Kumar, whose thesis titled "Exploiting Domain Structure in Multiagent Decision-Theoretic Planning and Reasoning" was supervised by Prof. Shlomo Zilberstein

Dr. Endrass will give a presentation about her research during the AAMAS conference (Thursday, May 8, 430pm)

Michael Winikoff (on behalf of the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award committee: Sarit Kraus, Mike Luck, Jeff Rosenschein, Sandip Sen, Carles Sierra, Katia Sycara)