This award 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. It is awarded for dissertations written as part of a PhD defended in the specified year, nominated by the supervisor (with supporting references), which show originality, depth, impact and written quality, supported by quality publications.
Note that the Victor Lesser Award relates to PhD dissertations defended in the specified year, so will be awarded (and listed here) the following year.
Previous winners
Advancing Deep Learning for Multi-agent AI: Mechanisms, Organizations, and Dynamics (supervised by David Parkes and Milind Tambe)
Runners-up: Théo Delemazure and Nicolas Teh
Facets of Proportionality: Selecting Committees, Budgets, and Clusters (supervised by Markus Brill)
Runner-up: Lily Xu
Application-Oriented Collective Decision-Making: Experimental Toolbox and Dynamic Environments (supervised by Rolf Niedermeier and Markus Brill)
Runners-up: Gabriele Farina and Evi Micha
Efficient and Effective Techniques for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Path Finding (supervised by Sven Koenig)
Runner-up: Shangtong Zhang
AI for Population Health: Melding Data and Algorithms on Networks (supervised by Milind Tambe)
Runner-up: Ellen Vitercik
Equilibrium Finding for Large Adversarial Imperfect-Information Games (supervised by Tuomas Sandholm)
Runners-up: Yuan Deng and Hang Ma
Fair Division of the Commons (supervised by Edith Elkind)
Runner-up: Kyle Hollins Wray
Dynamics of Reputations and the Self-organization of Cooperation (supervised by Francisco Santos, Jorge Pacheco, and Ana Paiva)
Runner-up: Haifeng Xu
Strategic Human-Agent Interaction: From Promoting Traffic Safety to Search and Rescue (supervised by Sarit Kraus)
Agents for Automated Human Persuasion (supervised by Sarit Kraus and Yonatan Aumann)
Runner-up: Piotr Skowron
Arbitration, Fairness and Stability: Revenue Division in Collaborative Settings (supervised by Edith Elkind)
Runners-up: Tim Baarslag and Xi (Alice) Gao
Manish Jain
Thwarting Adversaries with Unpredictability: Massive-scale Game-Theoretic Algorithms for Real-World Security Deployments (supervised by Milind Tambe)
Honorary Mentions: Iolanda Leite and Reshef Meir
Birgit Endrass
Cultural Diversity for Virtual Characters: Investigating Behavioral Aspects across Cultures (supervised by Elisabeth André)
Runners-up: Bradley Knox and Akshat Kumar
Daniel Villatoro
Social Norms for Self-Policing Multi-agent Systems and Virtual Societies (supervised by Jordi Sabater)
Runner-up: Albert Jiang
Automated Negotiation for Complex Multi-agent Resource Allocation (supervised by Victor Lesser)
Andrew Gilpin
Algorithms for Abstracting and Solving Imperfect Information Games (supervised by Tuomas Sandholm)
Computational Voting Theory: Of the Agents, By the Agents, For the Agents (supervised by Jeff Rosenschein)
Radu Jurca
Truthful reputation mechanisms for online systems (supervised by Boi Faltings)
Computational Aspects of Preference Aggregation (supervised by Tuomas Sandholm)
