This year eight PhD theses were nominated for the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. All nominees are of outstanding quality and made the choosing of a single winner extremely difficult. After many discussions and even several rounds of voting it was decided that this year the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award will have a winner and an explicit runner up.

The winner of this year's award is:

Daniel Villatoro with the thesis titled: "Social Norms for Self-Policing Multi-agent Systems and Virtual Societies", supervised by Jordi Sabater-Mir at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.

and the runner up is:

Albert Jiang with the thesis titled: "Representing and Reasoning with Large Games", supervised by Kevin Leyton-Brown at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

The award winner will give a presentation about his research during the AAMAS conference (Thursday, June 7, at 17-18).

Frank Dignum (on behalf of the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award committee: Andrea Omicini, Toru Ishida, Ana Paiva, Jaime Sichman and Katia Sycara).

Daniel Villatoro

"Social Norms for Self-policing Multi-agent Systems and Virtual Societies".

Abstract:

Social norms help people self-organizing in many situations where having an authority representative is not feasible. On the contrary to institutional rules, the responsibility to enforce social norms is not the task of a central authority but a task of each member of the society. In recent years, the use of social norms has been considered also as a mechanism to regulate virtual societies and specifically heterogeneous societies formed by humans and artificial agents.

Firstly we sketch a game-theoretical categorization of norms that will organize the rest of the talk. This dissertation generally tackles how norms (assuming their existence) become established inside a virtual society, such as those formed entirely by virtual agents or a combination of them with human subjects.

We initially tackle how conventions emerge when dealing with different topological structures of interactions. In this part we discovered how in social networks (with the theoretical characteristics of a scale-free) conventions cannot always emerge (even in the self-interest of the whole society), because of the emergence of subconventions that are facilitated by the inherent structure of the network. The identification of the Self-Reinforcing Substructures have allowed us to develop the necessary mechanisms to reach full convergence, which was never previously reached by any other researcher in the community.

After that we explore other mechanisms that allow the imposition of social norms, such as incentives mechanisms like punishment. We present an empirical study of how different punishment technologies affect differently human subjects and we develop an agent architecture (EMIL-I-A) which behaves similarly. This architecture is not only affected by the costs associated to punishment but also by the normative message it conveys, allowing the transmission of normative messages, establishing therefore the differentiation between punishment and sanction. This hypothesis is tested using a cross-methodological approach performing human experimentation and agent based simulation.

Finally, we explore another cognitive mechanism that would allow us to explain the voluntary non self-interested compliance, Internalization, by which agents comply with norms because so doing is an end in itself, and not merely because of external sanctions, such as material rewards or punishment."

Short Bio:

Daniel Villatoro completed his PhD at the IIIA-CSIC under the supervision of Dr. Jordi Sabater-Mir. His main research interests focus on self-policing mechanisms for the adaptation of virtual environments, paying special attention to the interaction of virtual entities and human subjects.

He has collaborated with known researchers in the area such as Sandip Sen, Rosaria Conte, Giulia Andrighetto or Michael Luck, and visited important institutions such as the Santa Fe Institute. Daniel has over 20 publications in top tier conferences and specialized journals.

Moreover he has been an active member of the community acting as general chair of the EASSS09 and EASSS11, and the MABS11 Workshop, and reviewer of the most important journals (such as JAAMAS, EAAI, or ACM TAAS) and conferences (such as AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS or ECAI).

** Call for Nominations **

Nominations are invited for the 2011 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award sponsored by IFAAMAS, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems and to be presented at AAMAS-2012 . Eligible doctoral dissertations are those defended between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011 in the area of Autonomous Agents or Multiagent Systems. This award includes a certificate signed by the IFAAMAS Chair, a 1500EUR award and an hour-long presentation in a special session of the conference on the work contained in the dissertation. The selection of the dissertation will be based on the originality, significance, and impact of the work. Evidence of such impact include publications at highly selective conferences and journals in the field with due importance given to AAMAS conference series and JAAMAS. Research output that resulted primarily from the student's initiative will be considered more favourably. The selection committee will be the final arbiter in the decision process. The selection committee might decide to consult external assessors and reserves the right to not award the prize if the nominations do not meet the expected quality level. The dissertation must be nominated by the thesis supervisor and must be supported by the following documents (the documents must be placed on a web page and only a link to this page e-mailed to the chair of the selection committee, Frank Dignum, at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it on or before February 28, 2012):

• A pdf file of the dissertation. If the dissertation is not written in English, the nomination must include a substantial manuscript in English, with the nominee as the first author, published in a journal or a prestigious conference.
• A list of citations to published papers based primarily on this dissertation with links to corresponding pdf files.
• A recommendation from the dissertation supervisor nominating the dissertation for the IFAAMAS-11 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. The recommendation should argue the merit of the dissertation and highlight, where relevant, how the work resulted from the initiative of the student. This document, not to exceed 500 words, should also certify the eligibility of the PhD by asserting that the PhD was defended in calendar year 2011.
• The names, email addresses, and affiliations of at most three referees, familiar with the research of the candidate and experts in the pertinent research area, who will directly email their recommendations for the candidate to the chair of the selection committee. It is the responsibility of the dissertation supervisor to contact the referees and ensure that the letters are submitted by the deadline. A reference letter should be no more than 500 words in length and should be on official letterhead, signed and emailed as scanned pdf file.