Milind Tambe, Professor of Computer Science and Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been chosen to receive the 2012 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award for his 1997 paper “Towards Flexible Teamwork” published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
Each year the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) recognizes publications that have made enduring contributions to the field. This award was established in 2006 to distinguish such formative publications. Professor Tambe will be presented with the award in June at the annual AAMAS Conference to be held this year in Valencia, Spain.
Tambe’s paper was one of the first papers which outlined and operationalized a comprehensive architecture for teamwork among intelligent agents that was founded on formal BDI-logic theories of teamwork. Put very basically, BDI is an abstraction to facilitate the programming of agents in terms of their goals and plans.
Building a complete framework proved extraordinarily impactful. Not only did it generate an entire new research area which concentrates on domain-independent teamwork among intelligent agents, it created a flexible general purpose platform so that the framework would not have to be rebuilt each time.
Shanghua Teng, Professor of Computer Science and Department Chair, says Professor Tambe “is one of the most special scholars in multi-agent systems and applied game theory. The impact of his work is profound.”
The concepts presented in the paper have influenced not only the fields in which Tambe’s works, but have continually shown to be broadly applicable to areas including education, training, entertainment, and information integration.
