Dr. Piotr Skowron from the UW Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics is the winner of the 2020 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) recognised his contributions to computational social choice and the theory of committee elections.

The Computers and Thought Award aims to recognise outstanding young scientists (under the age of 35) who specialise in artificial intelligence. It is presented by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. It was established with royalties received from the book “Computers and Thought”, edited by two American researchers Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman. The first award was granted to Terry Winograd, an American computer scientist from Stanford University in 1971. He is known for developing SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding computer program.

This year, Dr. Piotr Skowron from the Institute of Informatics at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics won the Computers and Thought Award. He was recognized for his contributions to computational social choice, in particular to the theory of committee elections. The scientist works on topics at the intersection of computer science, mathematics and theoretical economics, and he is specifically interested in social choice. In 2015 he won the runner-up of the IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. After his PhD, Dr. Piotr Skowron became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (2016-2017), and at TU Berlin (2017-2018) as a laureate of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Postdoctoral Rsearchers. Dr. Skowron’s interests concern linking ideas from economics, game theory, the theory of fair allocation, approximation algorithms and computational social choice.

More information about the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award >>