ACADEMIA

Six of Last Eight Recipients Have Carnegie Mellon Ties

The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) has named Ariel Procaccia, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, as the recipient of its prestigious Computers and Thought Award for 2015.

The award, presented every other year since 1971, recognizes outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. The judges cited Procaccia for his contributions to the fields of computational social choice and computational economics, and for efforts to make advanced fair division techniques more widely accessible.

Procaccia's studies in artificial intelligence focus on the use of social choice and game theory for resource allocation and collective decision-making. Last year, he launched a website, Spliddit.org, which leverages 70 years of fair division research to provide people with provably fair methods to resolve everyday dilemmas, such as how to split rent, divide goods or apportion credit for a project.

The award will be presented at the IJCAI conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 25-31.

Six of the last eight recipients of the Computers and Thought Award have Carnegie Mellon ties. In addition to Procaccia, they include Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science; former faculty member Carlos Guestrin, now of the University of Washington; and CMU alumni Peter Stone of the University of Texas, Andrew Ng of Stanford University and Vincent Conitzer of Duke University. Tom Mitchell, director of CMU’s Machine Learning Department, also was a recipient.

Earlier this year, the Sloan Foundation named Procaccia as a Sloan Research Fellow. He also is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2014), the inaugural Yahoo! Academic Career Enhancement Award (2011), the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award (2009) and the Rothschild postdoctoral fellowship (2009). In 2013, IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine named him one of "AI's 10 to Watch."

Procaccia joined CMU’s Computer Science Department in 2011. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and performed postdoctoral research at Microsoft Israel R&D Center and at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.