Tambe Tapped for Top AI Award

The Viterbi School’s Milind Tambe added to a long list of honors by being named the recipient of the ACM/SIGART Autonomous

UPDATE: Tambe gives his Award talk to some of the more than 800 computer scientists who gathered in Utrecht in late July, 2005 for the International Joint Conferencon Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. (Click on the image for a powerpoint file of his presentation)

Agents Research Award.

The distinction is annually awarded to a researcher who has made exceptional contributions over the preceding five years to the discipline of artificial intelligence “agents,” computer programs that can perform autonomously reacting to complex situations.
Tambe is an associate professor in the Viterbi School department of computer science. His specialty is having groups of agents coordinate their activities, often by negotiating with each other.

The official notification hailed the researcher's “seminal contributions to the theory, applications, and software infrastructure in the area of teamwork, which has become a flourishing research area in multi agent systems."

In addition to his substantial research contributions, Tambe has served the autonomous agents research community in a variety of ways, most recently as the General co-chair of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS2004).

The award carries an honorarium, along with an invitation to give a talk at the annual Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent System (AAMAS) Conference, which this year was held at Utrecht University, the Netherlands July 25-29.

At the conference, Tambe presented an overview of recent research using multi agent systems to coordinate fire and rescue operations, including work done with USC's CREATE homeland security center, in close coordination with the Los Angeles Fire Department, which hopes to put the system into use a s training system next year.
"This is a well-deserved honor for an outstanding researcher," said Gérard Médioni, chair of the USC Viterbi School Department of Computer Science. "Milind's foundational research work has become the reference for multi-agents systems. He is also leading the educational effort in this area through actions such as the Americas Agents School.

"In recent years, Tambe has won “best paper” prizes at a number of important conferences, including the AAMAS 2002 conference, the Best of Agents ’99 conference and others. He was this year’s recipient of the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award.