Awards, Awards, Awards

News

Tuomas Sandholm has just been informed of his election as a AAAI Fellow. This prestigious award recognizes “significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.” Usually, only members of AAAI who have made contributions for a decade or more will be selected. As you know, Tuomas works in the area of multiagent systems, and in particular has a strong interest in both the foundations and applications of computational game theory. He is particularly well-known for his work in combinatorial auctions and mechanisms for large-scale electronic commerce. More recently, he and his students have also been hard at work on the problem of solving two-player poker (something that I’ve taken a personal interest in ;-).

Congratulations, Tuomas!

Now, a word about all of these awards. It seems like our faculty received a lot of them this year. Maybe it’s always been like this, and I’m only noticing now because I’m the department head. But actually I think this has been an unusually good year. Here is a partial tally, in no particular order, just for this current academic year. (I realize I should never write down a list like this, because inevitably a few of the people who haven’t been listed might feel slighted. So let me make clear that this is just a quick off-the-cuff list.)

• Ed Clarke wins the Herbrand Award, the top award in automated reasoning, is named a University Professor, and wins the Turing Award, the top award in computer science research.
• Tuomas Sandholm is elected as a AAAI Fellow, and is also named by Conde Nast Portfolio as one of the most influential academics in business.
• Takeo Kanade wins the Franklin Institute’s Bower Prize, one of the richest awards in science.
• Raj Reddy wins the IEEE Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, the top award in the field.
• Randy Pausch wins the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, ACM’s top award for computing education.
• Roy Maxion is elected as an IEEE Fellow.
• Avrim Blum and Randy Pausch are elected as ACM Fellows.
• John Reynolds received an honorary doctorate from the University of London, Queen Mary and Westfield College.

Now, we’re a big place, and we’re also pretty senior. So one explanation for all of this is that we are all getting to “that age” when things like this start to happen. This would be a fine explanation, except that this seems to have been a banner year for the junior faculty as well. Again, a partial list, but this time containing only assistant professors:

• Alyosha Efros wins a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a Sloan Fellowship.
• Carlos Guestrin wins an ONR Young Investigator Award, as well as an IBM Faculty Fellowship.
• Eric Xing wins a Sloan Fellowship.
• Ryan O’Donnell wins an NSF CAREER Award.
• Luis von Ahn is a one-man awards wrecking crew. His credits include: Simon Award for Teaching Excellence; Technology Review Top 35 Innovator; Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship; Smithsonian Top 37 under Age 36; IEEE’s “Ten to Watch” in AI; MacArthur “Genius” award.
• Natassa Ailamaki wins a prestigious European Young Investigator Award.
• Jonathan Aldrich wins the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, for excellence in research in object-oriented systems.

Of course, I’m leaving out here those awards that we won by actually winning a competition — things like Manuela Veloso winning RoboCup (again!), and a number of “best paper” awards. Also notable is the amazing year our Ph.D. students are having, particularly in a supposedly “down” year at NSF. In particular, at least 8 of the incoming graduate students have already won fellowships, with at least 5 of them being NSF Graduate Fellowships!

So, what’s going on here? Well, probably things like this come in waves, though the height of the crest of the wave must be related to the intrinsic quality of the place. My guess, actually, is that we could have even bigger years soon, because a large number of our faculty are just now reaching the level of seniority where major awards (such as society fellowships) become a possibility. The other thing that might be going on is that we have people who are doing a good job nominating people for awards. Danny Sleator has been our “czar” for award nominations, and it looks like his work is starting to pay off. Frank Pfenning, who runs our Ph.D. program, has done well to get our students put up for fellowships. Randy Bryant, too, has been very active in this area, helping to organize some significant nomination projects. Finally, the contributions of many other staff people, for example the two media-relations staff in the School of Computer Science — Byron Spice and Anne Watzman — likely has been a factor as well.

At any rate, no matter the explanation, it’s been a fantastic year. And for a new department head, it is just great to have so much to brag about. Congratulations to everyone!

Peter Lee @ April 28, 2008