The selection committee for the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Yoav Shoham of Stanford University is the recipient of the 2008 award. Prof. Shoham has made significant and sustained contributions to Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in the areas of logic and game theory. He has made contributions on logics of knowledge and belief and on non-monotonic logic. He has proposed techniques of belief revision and importantly for MAS, a theory of belief fusion. He defined the framework for Agent Oriented Programming that represented a programming view of those theoretical notions studied. The paper describing AOP and published in 1993 is still one of the most cited papers on Agents research. His research on Game Theory includes seminal work on combinatorial auctions and on several topics on mechanism design. He performed early work on Social Laws and Conventions. He has proposed algorithms and test beds (CATS and GAMUT) that are widely used. On the practical side, he has founded two successful companies in the eCommerce industry. Overall, his research covers formal and practical aspects, and the impact of his work has been consistently very high for the last fifteen years.
