The SAIS AI Master's Thesis Award

In order to stimulate work in the area of artificial intelligence at the undergraduate level of education, SAIS has created a special yearly award for the best Master's thesis (examensarbete) in the area of artificial intelligence. The winner will be awarded travel funds of 5000SEK in addition to covering the expenses (up to 5000SEK) to attend SCAI 2011 to present their work.

To nominate a Master's thesis for the award, the following rules apply:

The thesis is in one of the main areas of artificial intelligence research.
The thesis has been presented officially during the period of January 1, 2010 - January 31, 2011.
An electronic copy of the thesis (PDF) and a short written motivation by the official examiner should be sent to the secretary of SAIS, Eva Blomqvist (evabl444@gmail.com), no later than February 6, 2011. The nomination should include a short motivation why the thesis should be selected as the winner and state its contributions to AI.
The official examiner or the primary supervisor must be a member of SAIS.
Only one thesis nomination per official examiner is permitted.

The SAIS board will review the nominated Master's theses and determine a winner based on factors such as novelty, thoroughness, readability, scientific value and relevance to artificial intelligence both with respect to research and to potential applications. The decision by the board will be final. The selected winner will be announced in time for the SCAI 2011, which will be held May 24-26 2011 in Trondheim, where the prize will be awarded.

The winner of the AI Master's Thesis award 2011 is Joseph Scott, Uppsala University.The title of the thesis is "Filtering Algorithms for Discrete Cumulative Resources". The supervisor is Mats Carlsson, SICS and the examiner is Justin Pearson, Uppsala University. The full announcement is available here. And all the nominations are available here.

Previous award winners:

2010: Nominations, motivation

Roberto Castañeda Lozano, KTH. Constraint Programming for Random Testing of a Trading System. Supervisors Christian Schulte, KTH and Lars Wahlberg, Cinnober AB.

2009: Nominations, motivation

Robert Johansson, Örebro University. Navigation on an RFID Floor. Supervisor Alessandro Saffiotti, Örebro University.

2008: Nominations, motivation

Malin Aktius, Chalmers University of Technology. Modeling Hydra Behavior Using Methods Founded in Behavior-Based Robotics. Supervisor Mats Nordahl, Chalmers University of Technology.

2007: Nominations, motivation

Boris Schäfer, the University of Skövde Detached tool use in evolutionary robotics - Evolving tool use skills. Supervisor Nicklas Bergfeldt, Högskolan i Skövde.

Jie Luo, the Royal Institute of Technology Incremental learning for Adaptive Visual Place Recognition in Dynamic Indoor Environments. Supervisor Harko Verhagen, the Royal Institute of Technology.

2006: Nominations, motivation

Germán Gonzalez, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Kinematic tracking and activity recognition using motion primitives. Supervisor Magnus Boman, the Royal Institute of Technology.

2005: Nominations, motivation

John Stening, University of Skövde. Exploring Internal Simulations of Perception in a Mobile Robot using Abstractions. Supervisors Henrik Jacobsson and Tom Ziemke, University of Skövde.

2004: Nominations, motivation

Mikael Asker, Lund Institute of Technology. Logical Reasoning with Temporal Constraints. Supervisor Jacek Malek, Lund Institute of Technology.

2003: Nominations, motivation

Gunnar Búason, Skövde University. Competitive Co-Evolution of Sensory-Motor Systems. Supervisor Tom Ziemke, Skövde University.

2002: Nominations, motivation

Dan-Anders Jirenhed, Linköping University. Exploring Internal Simulation of Perception in a Mobile Robot. Supervisor Tom Ziemke, Skövde University.

2000:

Mathias Broxvall, IDA. Computational Complexity of Point Algebras for Nonlinear Time.

Rockard Cöster, DSV. Learning from Relevance Feedback in Latent Semantic Indexing.

Christian Guttmann, DSV. A Software Architecture for Four-Legged Robots.