Ariel Procaccia receives the 2008 Victor Lesser Distinguished
Dissertation Award sponsored by IFAAMAS, the International Foundation
for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (http://www.ifaamas.org).

The selection committee for the IFAAMAS-08 Victor Lesser Distinguished
Dissertation Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Ariel Procaccia has
won the award. Dr. Procaccia received the Ph.D. in Computer Science
from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His thesis contains fundamental
contributions to computational social choice theory, covering a wide
variety of topics including the complexity of election manipulation,
the robustness of voting rules, the learnability of voting rules, and
incentive-compatible machine learning. Among other contributions, it
introduces a new way of analyzing the manipulability of social choice
functions, which has become influential in AAMAS and related research
communities.

The committee is also pleased to announce two runners-up: Dr. Matthew
Taylor, who received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, who received his
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of
Michigan. Dr. Taylor's thesis concerns transfer learning and Dr.
Vorobeychik's thesis studies empirical mechanism design. Both
dissertations also make innovative and influential contributions to
the field of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

Previous winners of this award were Radu Jurca (2007) and Vincent
Conitzer (2006).

The selection committee members were Vincent Conitzer, Les Gasser,
Radu Jurca, Sarit Kraus, Sandip Sen, and Makoto Yokoo (chair).