The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Manuela M. Veloso of Carnegie Mellon University is the recipient of the 2009 award. Prof. Veloso has made significant and sustained contributions to Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in the areas of planning and control learning in multi-agent systems. Prof. Veloso’s research is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the effective construction of teams of robot agents where cognition, perception, and action are seamlessly integrated to address planning, execution, and learning tasks. She has made significant contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, planning by analogical reuse, and more recently, robot learning from demonstration. Her research contributions have also been realized concretely in the form of teams of robot soccer playing agents that have won several international championships at the annual RoboCup robot soccer competitions. Her impact and visibility has been consistently high over the past two decades for her technical contributions, for her impressive robot teams, and for her leadership within the research community.
