Best poster prize for student at AI conference

At the recent twenty third edition of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI13), held in August in Beijing China, Christos Hadjinikolis (a PhD student in the Department of Informatics) was awarded the prize for best poster. Competition was fierce, with 413 posters taken into consideration, and the award is of particular significance given that the conference is widely recognised as the premier international conference on AI.

The poster describes work in the paper Opponent Modelling in Persuasion Dialogues by Christos Hadjinikolis, Yiannis Siantos, Sanjay Modgil, Elizabeth Black and Peter McBurney (all members of the Department of Informatics). The paper describes a computational model of how participants in dialogues can build models of other participants' beliefs, based on past dialogical interactions.

Commenting on the award, Christos spoke of the difficulty he faced in communicating the contributions of the paper in the condensed format of a poster: "The challenge was to communicate the essential ideas in a way that was convincing, while at the same time not going into too much detail. I wanted the poster to be an advert for the paper so that people would be motivated to then go read the paper". Christos's approach was to use his creative drawing skills to illustrate the ideas; as his supervisor Sanjay Modgil put it, "the poster was an exemplar of the use of art in the service of science".

Contact Christos for further information on this work (christos.hadjinikolis@kcl.ac.uk).