Researchers based at the British University of Dubai impressed a gathering of international IT experts in Honolulu, Hawaii.
BUiD researcher, Dr. Sherief M. Abdallah, was nominated for the Best Paper Award, placing him in the top 1.5% of all conference submissions, ahead of prestigious universities such as Edinburgh, MIT and Harvard. As the Autonomous Agent and Multiagent Systems conference (AAMAS) drew to a close, he was awarded a Certificate of Recognition.
Dr. Sherief Abdallah was also the keynote speaker at the launch of the Doctoral Mentoring Programme. He outlined his ideas about how to ensure young talents will continue to drive and shape the field.
Dr. Abdallah was not alone in making a considerable impact on the conference. Programme Committee member Dr. Iyad Rahwan, also a BUiD researcher, co-organised the Doctoral Mentoring Programme, which was designed for Ph.D. students from as far away as Canada and Texas (http://www.aamas2007.org/mentoring.html). Dr. Rahwan also organised a successful Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS) workshop attended by academics from such prestigious institutions as MIT and Imperial College.
The main conference was attended by representatives of top universities, including Oxford, Harvard and Stanford. Experts gathered to discuss the specialist themes of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems in computing and information technology (see www.aamas2007.org for more information). The conference was established by the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS), a non-profit organization designed to promote science and technology in artificial intelligence and its related fields.
BUiD's involvement in the conference paved the way for future collaboration with researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada and from an international consortium led by the University of Kyoto, Japan.
“We are very grateful to The British University in Dubai for supporting our conference attendance, and are excited about raising its profile as an international centre for research excellence in the area of Artificial Intelligence,” said Dr. Sherief M. Abdallah.
“The University’s presence and profile at this conference demonstrates the quality of the research environment we provide,” said Dr. Abdullah M. Alshamsi, Vice-Chancellor, The British University in Dubai.
“That we were the sole representative of the Arab world universities among these top international universities, and with such strong presence, illustrates the extent of recent advances at BUiD,” he added.
