Science and Technology

Técnico alumnus wins the Victor Lesser Dissertation Award 2018

The award was presented at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems.

Fernando Santos, former PhD student at Instituto Superior Técnico and currently postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, received the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation “ReputationDynamics and the Self Organization of Cooperation”, supervised by professor Ana Paiva (Department of Computer Engineering – DEI/IST), professor Francisco C. Santos (DEI/IST) and professor Jorge M. Pacheco (University of Minho). “I am pleased that my work has been recognised in this important international conference” says the Técnico alumnus. “I really admire the work of previous winners, so I feel very honoured to win this year’s edition”, he adds.

The International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) delivers this award annually. This year, the Victor Lesser Dissertation Award was delivered at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2019), the largest and most influential conference of this sub-field of Artificial Intelligence.

“My work combines concepts of game theory, complex systems and scientific computing”, explains Fernando Santos. Throughout his work, the Técnico alumnus tried to answer the question: “Will cooperation emerge if reputation building is costly?”. “I concluded that there are a few different ways of assigning reputation – or, if we prefer, social norms – that allow us to achieve high levels of cooperation”, says the Técnico alumnus. In order to better understand why some of these norms are used in several societies – and the most simple to use in artificial agents – Fernando Santos proposed a new method to quantify their efficiency and their level of complexity.

“These computational models help us to understand social dynamics and human behaviours, and allows you to test online reputation management in order to improve cooperation among various users”, says Fernando Santos. “Personally, I am very interested in understanding how to design a system where artificial agents cooperate in an autonomous way”, he adds. “Artificial intelligence has always been a multidisciplinary field that combines knowledge from different fields, from neuroscience to philosophy, and this fascinates me”, he says.

After his PhD and his research work at INESC-ID, Fernando Santos decided to embrace a new challenge at Princeton University. “It has been a very enriching experience. Working at Princeton University gives me the opportunity to interact with world-class researchers, which is great”, he says. “The atmosphere at Princeton is very stimulating and I feel that I am learning new ways of working and communicating, which is very positive”, he adds.

This award is named for Professor Victor Lesser, a long standing member of the AAMAS community who has graduated a large number of outstanding PhD students in the area. It is awarded for dissertations written as part of a PhD defended in the specified year, nominated by the supervisor (with supporting references), which show originality, depth, impact and written quality, supported by quality publications.