ECE alumni, Drs. Kagan Tumer and Adrian Agogino, received the Best Paper Award at the 2007 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).
Drs. Tumer and Agogino, both supervised by Professor Joydeep Ghosh while at UT, are researching ways to accommodate the anticipated tripling of air traffic over the next decade. The current system routes flights on the basis of projections that do not take into account rapidly changing conditions in weather or airport congestion. Drs. Tumer and Agogino's approach is to create agents to govern specific air locations and use reinforcement learning to keep them informed of changing conditions. This approach shows a 67% reduction in congestion over current air traffic flow management.
Dr. Agogino is now with NASA Ames and Professor Tumer works at Oregon State. The AAMAS is the preeminent agent conference with more than 500 participants from 34 different countries and an acceptance rate of 23%.
