The winner of the 2008 Distinguished Dissertations was:

Algorithms for Coalition Formation in Multi-Agent Systems
Talal Rahwan 
School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton

Talal Rahwan is a research fellow at the 5*-rated School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton He graduated in 2003 from the Department of Information Technology at the University of Aleppo in Syria, where he has been awarded the Al-Basel Presidential Award for Academic Achievement (the most prestigious award for students in Syria). He was then awarded an Overseas Research Scholarship to do his Ph.D. at the University of Southampton under the supervision of Professor Nicholar R. Jennings (deputy head of school for the period 2001-08). His research has been published in premium artificial intelligence conferences and journals, including the AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, JAIR and AIJ.

Talal Rahwan's dissertation

Short-listed candidates

Minimizing Dynamic and Higher Order Energy Functions using Graph Cuts
Pushmeet Kohli
Microsoft Research and formerly Department of Computing, Oxford Brookes University

Pushmeet Kohli's dissertation

 

 

Modelling and Computing the Quality of Information in e-Science
Paolo Missier
School of Computer Science, University of Manchester

Paolo Missier's dissertation

 

 

The 2008 panel members were:

Jane Hillston (Edinburgh, Chair), Saleem Bhatti (St Andrews), Ann Blandford (UCL), John Derrick (Sheffield), Leslie Ann Goldberg (Liverpool), David Hogg (Leeds), Chris Johnson (Glasgow), Ian Marshall (Kent), Peter Ryan (Newcastle), Susan Stepney (York).