Call for Nominations: 2024 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award
IFAAMAS, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, is pleased to announce the call for the 2024 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award.
The award is named after Professor Victor Lesser, a long-standing member of the AAMAS community who has supervised 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 period, and nominated by the supervisor (with supporting references), which show originality, significance, and impact, and are supported by high quality publications.
Nominations are invited for the award which is sponsored by IFAAMAS and will be presented at AAMAS 2025. The award includes a certificate and a 1500 EUR payment.
Eligibility: Eligible doctoral dissertations are those defended between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024 (both endpoints included) in the area of Autonomous Agents or Multiagent Systems.
Submission link: https://forms.gle/wc2YJBpSvSG2iLN87
Submission deadline: October 31, 2024 (anywhere on earth)
Selection procedure:
The selection of the dissertation will be based on the originality, significance, and impact of the work. Evidence of such impact includes publications at highly selective conferences and journals in the field, with due importance given to the AAMAS conference series and JAAMAS. Research output that resulted primarily from the student’s initiative will be considered more favorably.
The selection committee will be the final arbiter in the decision process. The selection committee might also decide to consult external assessors, and reserves the right to not award the prize if the nominations do not meet the expected quality level.
Every submitted dissertation must be nominated by the thesis supervisor and must be supported by the following 4 (four) documents, all of which should be delivered via the Google Form link above by October 31, 2024:
a) A link to a PDF file of the dissertation. If the dissertation is not written in English, the nomination must include an accessible link to a substantial manuscript in English, with the nominee as the first author, published in a peer-reviewed journal or conference.
b) A PDF that contains a list of publications that have arisen from the dissertation, with links to the published papers.
c) A recommendation from the dissertation supervisor, on departmental letterhead, nominating the dissertation for the 2024 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. The recommendation should explain the contribution of the dissertation to the field of autonomous agents and multiagent systems, argue the merit and possible future impact of the work, and highlight, where relevant, how the work resulted from the initiative of the student. Finally, this document should certify the eligibility of the PhD by asserting that the PhD was successfully defended between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.
d) A PDF with the names, email addresses, and affiliations of at least one and 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 (Nisarg Shah, [email protected]). A reference letter should be no more than 500 words in length, should be on an official letterhead, signed and emailed as a PDF file, and received by the same deadline of October 31, 2024. To ease the recovery of these emails, it is recommended that the subject of the recommendation letter email be “2024 Victor Lesser Award: Recommendation: <name of the candidate>”
Note: It is the responsibility of the dissertation supervisor to contact the referees and ensure that their letters (max 500 words, signed, and on letterhead) are submitted by the deadline.
Though the nomination is to be submitted by the nominee’s dissertation supervisor, it is required that the nominee has consented that the dissertation be considered for this award and, if selected for the award, commits to attending the AAMAS 2025 conference, where they will receive the award and will give a presentation on the work contained in the dissertation at a special session of the conference. The cost of attending the conference is not covered by the award.
For questions, please contact the chair of the selection committee, Nisarg Shah, at [email protected].
Best of luck,
Nisarg