A best paper award at the 2009 International conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems went to Milind Tambe's team, for recent work done for the Federal Air Marshals. 

The paper,  "IRIS - A Tool for Strategic Security Allocation in Transportation Networks" won the honor in the application section of the eighth international conference on the subject, held in Budapest, May 10-15.

Milind Tambe, with Mark Kukulich and Harry Weimer of the Federal Air Marshals, IRIS paper co-author Chris Kiekintveld, James Curren (FAMS), and IRIS co-authors Shyamsunder Rathi  and  Jason Tsai. (Not shown: Fernando Ordónez.)

Besides Tambe, a professor in the Viterbi School Department of Computer Science, the co-authors include Fernando Ordónez of the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and grad students Jason Tsai, Shyamsunder Rathi, and Christopher Kiekintveld.

The Tambe team recently met at USC with Federal Air Marshals to discuss the IRIS system, which is a follow-on to the ARMOR system now in regular use at Los Angeles airport.

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multiagent systems.  The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.