Congratulations to Professor Vince Conitzer, who has been awarded the 2011 Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), a premier international AI research organization. The award is presented every two years to the world’s top AI researchers under the age of 35.

"I was stunned," says Conitzer, who received a personal call from IJCAI President Hiroaki Kitano in January to inform him about the award. "It's a great honor."

"The list of recipients of the Computers and Thought award is a who's who of the great researchers in the field," says Department Chair Carlo Tomasi. "We are very proud that our own Vince has been inducted into this elite group. The award committee could not have chosen a more deserving recipient."

Since joining the Duke faculty five years ago, Conitzer has published over 60 papers in respected conferences and journals, won a Sloan fellowship, and, most recently, received an NSF CAREER award. Now, the IJCAI honors Conitzer for his "seminal work at the boundary of microeconomic theory and artificial intelligence, in particular for groundbreaking work on computational aspects of game theory, social choice, and mechanism design," according to the organization.

"I owe a lot to my excellent students, my own advisor, my other collaborators, and my colleagues at Duke. People don’t win this kind of award on their own," says Conitzer, who is currently on sabbatical at the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, his hometown. Conitzer's own PhD adviser, Professor Tuomas Sandholm at Carnegie Mellon University, won the award in 2003.

"The award is the most prestigious award a young scientist in the area of AI can win. Winning it is a life-altering event," says Sandholm. "I cannot imagine a more deserving winner than Vince."

Conitzer shares this year's award with Malte Helmert, an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg for his work in automated planning and combinatorial search. The two will be honored during a ceremony at the 2011 IJCAI conference in July in Barcelona, Spain, where each will give a plenary lecture.

Conitzer will also be featured in the January/February 2011 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems, a publication of the IEEE Computer Society, as one of AI's Top 10 Researchers to Watch.