The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Jonathan Gratch and Prof. Stacy Marsella from the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies are the joint recipients of the 2010 award. Prof. Marsella and Prof. Gratch have made significant and sustained contributions to autonomous agents and multiagent systems in the area of virtual agents, in particular in emotion modeling and social simulation. Their agent models have vastly contributed to the field of embodied conversational agents. Their work balances theoretical and engineering achievements, allowing the understanding of the factors and processes underlying how emotion affects behaviors. They have also proposed a novel way to validate computational models of human emotions. Their work has been applied to large projects in multiple application domains such as interactive drama and serious games. Prof. Marsella has served the autonomous agents research community, in a variety of ways, including chairing the Virtual agent track of the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010). Prof. Gratch is the current president of the Humaine Association for Research on Emotions and Human-Machine Interaction as well as the founding editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. They have won the Best Innovative System/Application Paper Award at the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2003).
