The selection committee for the SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Makoto Yokoo of the NTT Communication Science Laboratories is the recipient of the 2004 award. Dr. Yokoo has made significant and sustained contributions to the research on autonomous agents and multi agent systems. In particular, Dr. Yokoo made seminal contributions to the area of distributed constrain satisfaction, which has become a flourishing research area in multi agent systems. Dr. Yokoo has also contributed to the areas of mechanism design in anonymous environments and secure protocols for combinatorial optimization problems. In addition to his substantial research contributions, Dr. Yokoo has served the autonomous agents research community, most recently as a Technical Program co-chair of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent systems (AAMAS 2003) and has been a leading figure in the autonomous agents community in Japan and Asia/Pacific Rim.
