Tuomas Sandholm, the Angel Jordan University Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2021 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for his AI research and service to the AI community.

Specifically, the award cites Sandholm for his outstanding research contributions in AI, its application to electronic marketplaces, his highly original use of AI in strategic multiplayer games such as poker, and the application of AI to optimize transplant organ exchanges.

He will receive the award at the AAAI's Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence conference, which will be held virtually Feb. 4–6, and will present an hourlong keynote lecture at the conference.

Sandholm's research focuses on the convergence of artificial intelligence, economics and operations research.

Since 1989, Sandholm has pioneered large-scale combinatorial markets. He founded research fields such as market clearing algorithms, structured bidding languages, preference elicitation from multiple parties, and automated mechanism design. He founded a company that fielded 800 of the largest combinatorial multi-attribute markets, totaling $60 billion and saving customers more than $6 billion. His current startup, Optimized Markets, brings a new optimization-powered paradigm to advertising campaign creation, scheduling and pricing optimization in TV, digital and cross-media advertising.

Along with his students, Sandholm has developed leading algorithms for several general classes of games. Last year, their AI called Pluribus became the first and only AI to beat professional poker players at multiplayer No-Limit Texas Hold'em, the first superhuman AI milestone in any game with more than two players. No-Limit Texas Hold'em is the main benchmark for testing algorithms that solve imperfect-information games. His startup, Strategy Robot, develops and fields computational game theory and opponent exploitation products for defense and intelligence applications. His startup Strategic Machine applies the technologies to business, finance and gaming applications.

Since 2010, Sandholm's algorithms have been running the national kidney exchange for the United Network for Organ Sharing, where they autonomously make the kidney exchange transplant plan for 80% of all U.S. transplant centers each week. He also co-invented never-ending altruist-donor-initiated chains, which have become the main modality of kidney exchange worldwide and have led to around 10,000 life-saving transplants. He also invented multi-organ exchanges; the first liver-kidney swap took place in 2019.

He has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Marvin Minsky Medal for his work on computer poker, the Computers and Thought Award, the inaugural ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award, the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, a Sloan Fellowship, a Carnegie Science Center Award for Excellence, an Edelman Laureateship, and an NSF Career Award. He is a fellow of the ACM, AAAI and INFORMS.

The Engelmore award honors the late Robert Engelmore, a Carnegie Mellon physics alumnus who was an AI research director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an editor of AI Magazine and executive director of the Heuristic Programming Project at Stanford University. Previous recipients of the award with Pittsburgh connections include Stephen Smith, research professor in the Robotics Institute; Bruce Buchanan of the University of Pittsburgh; and CMU alumnus Edward Feigenbaum of Stanford.