Medal of Honor

Some months ago I bookmarked a piece in the Wall Street Journal, about the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military's highest combat award.  It talks about life after the medal, for the recipients of this very famous award.  They find they  have some obligations to represent the armed services, the medal itself and the others who have received it, in addition to their own colleagues left behind on the battlefield.  It's a much more complicated honor than other kinds of awards for extraordinary accomplishment, which are also often done in teams, such as scientific awards (which are for happier, less desperate accomplishments that are survived by all the participants).  The article speaks about how previous medal winners support new ones with advice and encouragement on what they should expect. At the time the story was published (in May 2019) there were 70 living recipients of the Medal of Honor.

Here's the WSJ story:

‘It’s a Lifelong Burden’: The Mixed Blessing of the Medal of Honor
America’s highest award for combat valor is both a gift and a constant reminder of what’s often the worst day of recipients’ lives  By Michael M. Phillips.

"For those who earn it, the medal is a loaded gift. It’s a source of instant celebrity, and an entree into a world of opportunity and adulation. It’s also a reminder of what is often the worst day of their lives. And it is a summons to a lifetime of service from those who did something so courageous as young men—so at odds with their own chances of survival—that it was beyond what duty demands."

Congratulations to Yannai Gonczarowski

Yannai Gonczarowski, who will be  a post-doc at Microsoft Research New-England starting this summer, has collected some awards... Here are two announcements:

Dr. Yannai A. Gonczarowski wins the 2019 SIGecom Disseration Award

The 2019 SIGecom Disseration Award is given for an outstanding dissertation in the field of economics and computation

and Yannai Gonczarowski wins Best Paper Award at MATCH-UP 2019

You can find his award talk from EC'19 here:

"Aspects of Complexity and Simplicity in Economic Mechanisms"

https://www.facebook.com/1775878152557803/videos/2808456079229122/

And his talk about the gap-year academies redesign here:

"Matching for the Israeli "Mechinot" Gap-Year Programs: Handling Rich Diversity Requirements" with Lior Kovalio, Noam Nisan, and Assaf Romm

https://www.facebook.com/1775878152557803/videos/2825212147551296/

HT: Assaf Romm, who writes

"Yannai is possibly one of the best examples of the increasingly large group of CS people who are also "real" market designers. Not only does he have several innovative works on computational and economic aspects of stable matchings (such as their communication complexity, manipulability by coalitions, and strategic simplicity) and auctions, but he is also one of the main forces behind the new redesign of the market for the gap-year academies in Israel. "

Hayek at auction at Sothebys

It closed last month, but you can still take a look at the outcome of Sotheby's sale called
Friedrich von Hayek: His Nobel Prize and Family Collection
ONLINE BIDDING CLOSED19 Mar 2019 |
Sale L19409

"Sotheby’s is honoured to offer the Nobel Prize and Family Collection of Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992). Hayek was a towering intellectual figure of the twentieth century and his writings have had a profound impact in shaping the modern world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974 for “pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations”. This month sees the 75th anniversary of his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom."

Despite the title of the sale, Hayek's Nobel medal doesn't seem to have been on offer, although his U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom , awarded by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, went for 112,500 GBP.

The most expensive item was his annotated copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, for which the hammer came down at 150,000 GBP.

The auction notes state:
"Hayek’s underlining includes phrases from the first paragraph of Chapter II which reads “This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, through very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” (p.12) and later “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” (p.13)."
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I've blogged about previous Nobel auctions:

Thursday, October 27, 2016 Re-auction of Kenneth Wilson's, 1982 Nobel medal for Physics

Tuesday, October 11, 2016 John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences medal and memorabilia: Auction at Sotheby's

Thursday, February 26, 2015 Kuznets' Nobel Prize medal auction

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 Crick's Nobel medal, and letter to his son describing DNA

 

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 Nobel medal and diploma of Francis Crick: available at auction

Congratulations to Paul Milgrom: 2017 CME Group-MSRI Prize

The award ceremony is today:  2017 CME Group-MSRI Prize

The 12th annual CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications will be awarded to PAUL MILGROM, Shirley and Leonard Ely professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics and professor, by courtesy, at both the Department of Management Science and Engineering and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, at a luncheon in Chicago on February 12, 2018.

The CME Group-MSRI Prize is awarded to an individual or a group to recognize originality and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics.

About Paul Milgrom

Paul Milgrom's primary research is directed to designing auctions for multiple unique but related items. Along with Robert Wilson, he introduced the initial design for sales of radio spectrum licenses in the United States. He has designed new auctions for Internet advertising and for procuring complex services. Research on incentives and complexity are combined to create auctions that are simple and straightforward for bidders, yet which dramatically improve resource allocation compared to traditional auction designs.

After earning his PhD at the GSB, Milgrom taught at Northwestern University and Yale before returning to Stanford. He has made well-known contributions to many areas of economics, including auctions, incentive theory, industrial economics, economic history, economics of manufacturing, economics of organizations, and game theory. His book coauthored with John Roberts, Economics, Organization and Management, opened a new area to economic research.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and winner of the 2008 Nemmers Prize in Economics and the 2012 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge award.

About the event

Prior to the lunch and award presentation, a panel discussion on Frontiers of Research in Market Design will be held with the following panelists:

• Mohammad Akbarpour, Assistant Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
• Piotr Dworczak, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Chicago
• Shengwu Li, Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Department of Economics, Harvard University
• Ellen Muir, Research Fellow, School of Mathematics & Statistics, The University of Melbourne

Luncheon remarks, an appreciation of the life and work of Paul Milgrom:

• Roger Myerson, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

Paul Milgrom will present at talk on A Market Process to Reallocate Radio Spectrum.

2017 CME Group-MSRI Prize Selection Committee: David Eisenbud (chair), Director, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Lars Peter Hansen, Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Economics and Statistics at the University of Chicago. 2008 CME-MSRI Prize. 2013 Nobel Prize Winner Bengt Holmström, the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 2013 recipient of the CME-MSRI Prize. 2016 Nobel Prize Winner. R. Preston McAfee, Chief Economist & Corp VP, Microsoft Leo Melamed, Chairman Emeritus, CME Group Roger Myerson, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago. 2007 Nobel Prize Winner Maureen O'Hara, Robert W. Purcell Professorship of Management; and Professor of Finance, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University Myron Scholes, Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business Hugo Sonnenschein, Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago Jean Tirole, Scientific Director of Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) and Member of the Toulouse School of Economics and 2010 recipient of the CME-MSRI Prize

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Here's an earlier announcement, of this prize and some others. Paul is deservedly a prize magnet, and this year he won three notable prizes.
Paul wins CME-MSRI Prize

Update:  and here's today's story from the CME
WHY PAUL MILGROM IS AN ECONOMIST YOU SHOULD KNOW

Science talent search finalists (and some alumni)

The  Regeneron Science Talent Search, which was sponsored by Westinghouse when I was in high school, has announced  its finalists this year, who compete for college scholarships by submitting the results of their scientific investigations.

Here's the story from CNN:
Could these students provide the science breakthroughs of the future?

I participated when I was in high school, but without progressing very far in the competition.

There are more science competitions for high school students than there used to be. I already blogged about one of the finalists (you can find them all here):

Komo, Andrew
Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, Maryland
Cryptographically Secure Proxy Bidding in Ascending Clock Auctions

He came in first in another competition:

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Auction design wins a national high school science prize

Bob Wilson, Paul Milgrom and Dave Kreps win the Carty Award

Game theory at Stanford:)

Here's the press release from the National Academy of Science

David M. Kreps, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Paul R. Milgrom, Stanford University Department of Economics, and Robert B. Wilson, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, will receive the 2018 John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science.

"Kreps and Wilson provided a framework, known as sequential equilibrium, for modeling dynamic effects in economics. All three of the award winners, together with other collaborators and in particular D. John Roberts, employed these techniques to model and study reputation and collusion, both of which have broad applications in macroeconomics, industrial organization, and labor economics.

Later, the entire modern telecommunications industry arose out of an auction format developed by Milgrom and Wilson, along with Preston McAfee, for the 1994 radio spectrum auctions by the Federal Communications Commission. The simultaneous ascending auction format, in which each bidder can bid for multiple licenses over a series of rounds so long as it remains “sufficiently active,” has since been used around the world to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of wireless licenses. Variations of the format have also been applied to numerous other industries, including electricity markets and various commodity markets.  

The three award winners, with collaborators and alone, have contributed broadly to other topics in economics: Kreps has done foundational work in choice theory and financial market theory; Milgrom, in the theories of market microstructure and the principal-agent problem; and Wilson, in nonlinear pricing and utility regulation, as well as the foundations of dynamic equilibria.

The John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science is awarded every two years, to recognize noteworthy and distinguished accomplishments. In 2018 the award is presented in the field of economics. The award is presented with a medal and a $25,000 prize."

Nobels and other prizes, and/despite the collaborative nature of science

The Nobel prizes have brought out some thoughtful critiques of the practice of prizes being awarded to individual scientists or to a few among many. (See e.g. these articles in The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Conversation.) They sensibly focus on the fact that prizes single out individuals, while science is increasingly (inevitably) done by teams, whether real teams or virtual ones--acrobats of all sizes standing on the shoulders of giants.

I'm of two minds about this (maybe three--because it is a lot of fun to be a guest of honor at a big prize party).

I agree that, within science, prizes to individuals add unnecessary celebrity culture to science, and gloss over the fact that science is a team sport.

On the other hand, outside the walls of academe, it is a good thing to see science celebrated in the culture at large. I don't know of an equally effective way to do that than to temporarily designate some scientists as celebrities of the day.

Scientific celebrity may not be the real thing (as measured by twitter followers, for example), but it serves a role in reminding our fellow citizens that the pursuit of reliable knowledge is a good thing, especially considering the alternatives.

Should historians of science adjudicate scientific awards?

Historian of Economics Beatrice Cherrier blogs about the two Golden Goose Awards that have been made for various parts of market design (in 2013 and 14), and suggests that more deserving topics could have been picked...

How about every historian of science nominates a candidate for the Golden Goose Award?

The Vatican celebrates Frank Delmonico

Here's the (November 29th) announcement from the New England Organ Bank:
We are very proud to announce that New England Organ Bank's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Francis Delmonico, was inducted into the Pontifical Academy of Sciences this week.
"With this lifetime appointment, he becomes one of just 70 leaders in the field of science today to have this honor. Among other members are theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Human Genome Project founder Francis Collins. In addition to his long career as a kidney transplant surgeon, Dr. Delmonico leads the World Health Organization's efforts to prevent transplant tourism and organ trafficking."

Here's Frank's page at the Pontifical Academy: Francis L. Delmonico

Here's a photo he sent me:

Marilda Sotomayor wins the 2016 TWAS prize for Social Science

THE WORLD ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (TWAS), for the advancement of science in developing countries, has just announced its 2016 prizes:

Winners of 2016 TWAS Prizes announced

TWAS has announced the winners of the TWAS Prizes for 2016 at the Academy's 27th General Meeting in Kigali, Rwanda.

TWAS Prizes are awarded in nine fields: Agricultural Sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Mathematics, Medical Sciences, Physics, and Social Sciences (called the TWAS-Celso Furtado Prize). This year, there are 10 prize winners: two from Brazil; one from Chile; two from China; two from India; one from Mexico; one from Pakistan and one from Turkey. The prize winners include one woman.

Each TWAS Prize carries a cash award of USD15,000. The winners will lecture about their research at TWAS's 28th General Meeting in 2017, when they will also receive a plaque and the prize money.

****************
Here is the part about Marilda:

Social Sciences

• Marilda SOTOMAYOR of Brazil for her extraordinary contribution and innovative research in the field of matching markets  

Re-auction of Kenneth Wilson's, 1982 Nobel medal for Physics

The Nobel Prize medal awarded to physicist Kenneth G. Wilson in 1982 is up for auction, again. (Apparently its hard to pick an appropriate reservation price...)

Here's the current auction page:
Nobel Prize Awarded to Physicist Kenneth G. Wilson in 1982 -- One of the Kingpins of Quantum Physics, OCTOBER 2016 AUCTION ENDS THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27TH, 5PM PACIFIC
Minimum Bid:$95,000


Here's the previous auction (from the same auction house), which apparently didn't draw any bids:
MAY 2016 AUCTION ENDS THURSDAY, MAY 26TH, 5PM PACIFIC

Minimum Bid:	$450,000
Final prices include buyers premium.:	$0
Number Bids:	0

****************
Update: this auction apparently didn't draw any bids either:

Current Bidding
Minimum Bid:	$220,000
Final prices include buyers premium.:	$0
Number Bids:	0

Auction closed on Thursday, October 27, 2016.

John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences medal and memorabilia: Auction at Sotheby's

 Here's the auction page:
John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 
17 OCTOBER 2016 | 2:00 PM EDT | NEW YORK,
Estimate  2,500,000 — 4,000,000  USD.

There are some essays and paragraphs from colleagues and relatives at the auction link.
Here's a 3 minute video from Sotheby's, advertising the auction...

***************
Update:
I'm guessing that this results page means that the auction closed without a sale (perhaps because the reserve price was not reached...):
http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/results.results.sale.pdf/2016/john-f-nash-jrs-1994-nobel-memorial-n09586.pdf

JOHN F. NASH, JR.'S 1994 NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMIC SCIENCES October 17, 2016 Sale Number N09586 Sale Total (Including Buyer's Premium) 0 USD

A von Neumann medal in the shape of a saddle point

It's a little hard to see, but the medal forms a saddle point: the intersection of the two lines is a maximum in the horizontal direction and a minimum in the vertical direction...  It had been a long time since I thought of equilibrium that way, but it is from von Neumann's first game theory paper, on two person zero sum games and the minimax theorem.

It is from my trip to Hungary in early September. You can read about it in Hungarian...

Nobel-díjas közgazdász, Alvin E. Roth kapta idén a Neumann János-díjat

Piaci megoldással osztaná el a migránsokat a Nobel-díjas közgazdász


Nobel-díjas közgazdász oldhatja meg a menekültproblémát

Hungarian radio: (interview in Hungarian voice-over)
A pénz sem old meg mindent - így látja a Nobel-díjas, InfoRádió / Czwick Dávid

Isten teremtette a búzát. És az árutőzsdét? (a newspaper interview in Hungarian)

Google translate: God created the wheat. And the commodities market?

Knuth award to Noam Nisan

Mazel tov to Noam Nisan!

Hebrew University's Nisan Cited for Fundamental and Lasting Contributions to Theoretical Computer Science

New York, September 8, 2016 —The 2016 Donald E. Knuth Prize will be awarded to Noam Nisan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for fundamental and lasting contributions to theoretical computer science in areas including communication complexity, pseudorandom number generators, interactive proofs, and algorithmic game theory. The Knuth Prize is jointly bestowed by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing (TCMF). It will be presented at the 57th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2016) in New Brunswick, NJ, October 9–11.

Nisan’s work has had a fundamental impact on complexity theory, which examines which problems could conceivably be solved by a computer under limits on its resources, whether it is on its computation time, space used, amount of randomness or parallelism. One of the major ways in which computer scientists have explored the complexity limits is through the use of randomized algorithms. Nisan has made major contributions exploring the power of randomness in computations. His work designing pseudorandom number generators has offered many insights on whether, and in what settings, the use of randomization in efficient algorithms can be reduced.

Nisan has been a major player in Algorithmic Game Theory, and, through his 1999 paper with Amir Ronen, has laid the foundation of Algorithmic Mechanism Design. A mechanism is an algorithm or protocol that is explicitly designed so that rational participants, motivated purely by their self-interest, will achieve the designer's goals. This is of paramount importance in the age of the Internet, with many applications from auctions to network routing protocols. Nisan has designed some of the most effective mechanisms by providing the right incentives to the players. He has also shown that in a variety of environments there is a tradeoff between economic efficiency and algorithmic efficiency. Nisan is a co-editor of Algorithmic Game Theory, a fundamental text in the field.

He is also a leading authority in communication complexity, an area of computer science research that examines the amount of information that needs to be transferred between parties for computational problems. With Eyal Kushilevitz, Nisan co-authoredCommunication Complexity, an authoritative text in the field.

Nisan is professor of computer science and engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also a graduate of Hebrew University, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He received the 2012 Gödel Prize (with Elias Koutsoupias, Christos Papadimitriou, Amir Ronen, Tim Roughgarden and Éva Tardos), the 1990 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “Using Hard Problems to Create Pseudorandom Generators,” and the 2004 Michael Bruno Memorial Award.

The Donald E. Knuth Prize is named in honor of Donald Knuth of Stanford University who has been called the “father of the analysis of algorithms.”

MIÉRT GYERE EL? von Neumann lecture in Budapest on Who Gets What and Why, Sept 6

MIÉRT GYERE EL?
"We cordially invite you to the 2016 John von Neumann Award Ceremony and the public lecture held by the awardee on the 6th September. The title of the lecture will be "Who Gets What and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design”. 2012 Nobel laureate Professor Roth is going to talk about the matching markets hidden around us, from kindergarten choice through kidney transplantations to college football, and about how to make them work.

The lecture is organized by Rajk László College for Advanced Studies with the contribution of Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (KTI). The lecture will be held in English."
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Here's a news story announcing the event
Alvin E. Roth kapja az idei Neumann János-díjat
Google translate: Alvin E. Roth will receive this year's John Von Neumann Prize

The students at Rajk László College, who choose the recipient of this annual award, have done a good job in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann_Award

Congratulations to the winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)

Here's the announcement from the NSF:

President Obama honors early career scientists with top White House award

Twenty-one researchers nominated by the National Science Foundation receive awards for innovation, outreach in scientific community

and here's the list (one of which has "economics" in the citation...):

February 18, 2016

President Barack Obama today named 106 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), granting them the U.S. government's highest award for scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The National Science Foundation (NSF) nominated 21 of the awardees.

PECASE recognizes scientists and engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Winners demonstrate the ability to broadly advance fundamental research and help the United States maintain its position as a leading producer of scientists and engineers.

"The awardees are outstanding scientists and engineers," said NSF Director France Córdova. "They are teacher-scholars who are developing new generations of outstanding scientists and engineers and ensuring this nation is a leading innovator. I applaud these recipients for their leadership, distinguished teaching and commitment to public outreach."

The NSF-nominated awardees come from universities around the country and excel in areas of science represented by NSF directorates: biology, computer and information science, education and human resources, engineering, geosciences, mathematics and physical sciences and social and behavioral sciences.

NSF vetted the research of its nominees through its rigorous peer review process. All of the NSF nominees have received five-year grants from the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program. CAREER awardees have proven themselves exemplary in integrating research and education. Selection is highly competitive: in 2012, NSF funded fewer than 20 percent of the 2,612 CAREER award applicants.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President coordinated the PECASE awards, which were established by President Clinton in 1996. Awardees are selected on the basis of two criteria: pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and a commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education or community outreach.

This year's NSF recipients are:

Adam Abate, University of California, San Francisco

For his development of microfluidic approaches for creating single-cell bioreactors that may be applied to massively parallel approaches in single-cell genomics and transcriptomics and that can be implemented across a variety of disciplines including evolutionary biology, immunology, and cancer biology and for his outreach to underrepresented groups and veterans.

Marcel Agüeros, Columbia University

For his groundbreaking research in stellar astrophysics, and for his restless desire to ensure that minority students in sciences become tomorrow's leaders.

Arezoo Ardekani, University of Notre Dame

For research aimed to fundamentally understand, model and control bacterial biofilm formation through imaginative computations and elegant experiments, and for demonstrated commitment to increase underrepresented minority participation in STEM-related research.

Cullen Buie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For research to create highly sensitive systems that probe microbial physiology and thereby illustrate the coupling of cell phenotypes with virulence, and to train a new generation of underreprented minority scientists who become faculty.

Erin Carlson, Indiana University

For discovery of chemistry underlying a new approach to treat antibiotic-resistant infections, for leadership in the chemistry and women-chemists communities, and for developing new hands-on laboratory activities to engage K-12 students in natural product chemistry.

Antonius Dieker, Georgia Tech Research Corporation

For outstanding research on the stochastic behavior in engineered and physical systems; and for educational activities involving high school, undergraduate and graduate students.

Erika Edwards, Brown University

For innovative research leading to exciting breakthroughs in understanding the drivers of plant evolutionary innovation, and particularly the evolution of plant form and photosynthesis systems, and for engaging public outreach on plant biology.

Julia Grigsby, Boston College

For her work on the invariants of 3-manifolds, running advanced workshops, training graduate and undergraduate students, contributions to increasing participation of women in mathematical sciences and introducing talented middle-school girls to research mathematics.

Todd Gureckis, New York University

For his innovative work at the boundary of cognitive science, learning science and machine learning; for his work with museums to enhance the learning potential for children; and for creating an integrated, multidisciplinary curriculum for computational cognitive science for the workforce of the 21st century.

Tessa Hill, University of California, Davis

For her transdisciplinary research that places modern ocean acidification and ocean oxygenation into a long-term Earth-system context, and for training and outreach to K-12 teachers and students that offers them a better understanding of ocean science and climate change through inquiry-based learning.

Daniel Krashen, University of Georgia

For his work on local-to-global principles, organizing conferences and workshops, training graduate students and serving as a role model to underrepresented minorities in mathematics.

Daniel McCloskey, College of Staten Island, City University of New York

For research combining modeling, neurophysiology and systems biology/network science that will transform the field of social neuroscience by providing a comprehensive approach towards understanding the role of neuropetides in complex behavioral systems.

Rahul Mangharam, University of Pennsylvania

For inventing a new formal methodology to test and verify the correct operation of medical device software, saving lives and reducing care costs.

David Masiello, University of Washington

For his cutting-edge research in the emerging field of theoretical molecular nanophotonics, and for his comprehensive educational and outreach programs including an exemplary focus on enhancing the scientific communication abilities of young researchers.

Shwetak Patel, University of Washington

For inventing low-cost, easy-to-deploy sensor systems that leverage existing infrastructures to enable users to track household energy consumption and make the buildings we live in more responsive to our needs.

Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania

For visionary research on protecting personal data via differential privacy, and outstanding outreach that fosters interaction between the many communities that study data privacy from theoretical computer science to economics.

Sayeef Salahuddin, University of California, Berkeley

For pioneering research on the foundations of nanostructures as new, low-power electronics with potential influence on energy efficient systems, and for impact on industry, education and mentoring future scientists.

Jakita Thomas, Spelman College

For her research on how African-American middle-school girls develop computational algorithmic thinking within the context of designing games, a research project that explores the challenges African-American girls face and their self-perceptions as problem-solvers while at the same time educating them in mathematics, programming and reasoning.

Joachim Walther, University of Georgia

For building research capacity in engineering education by defining quality in qualitative research methods and leading communities of practice in this research, germane to and commonly used in broadening participation efforts.

Kristen Wendell, University of Massachusetts Boston

For her outstanding research work on how to integrate a community-based engineering design model into pre-service science elementary school teachers focused on crosscutting concepts, disciplinary core ideas and scientific and engineering practices.

Benjamin Williams, University of California, Los Angeles

For a comprehensive vision to advance Terahertz quantum-cascade lasers and devices for communications, sensing and imaging, and for leadership in enhancing undergraduate and graduate student learning experiences.

Fuhito Kojima and Parag Pathak receive the 2016 Social Choice and Welfare Prize

 Congrats to Fuhito and Parag:)

FUHITO KOJIMA AND PARAG PATHAK RECEIVE THE HEIGHT SOCIAL CHOICE AND WELFARE PRIZE

A jury composed of Claude d'Aspremont (chair, President-elect of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare), Vincent Conitzer, Bhaskar Dutta (President of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare), Marc Fleurbaey and Tim Roughgarden has chosen to award the height Social Choice and Welfare Prize jointly to Fuhito Kojima (Stanford  University) and Parag Pathak(MIT).

The purpose of the Social Choice and Welfare Prize is to honour young scholars of excellent accomplishment in the area of social choice theory and welfare economics. The laureate should be 40 years or less as of January of the year when the International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare is scheduled to take place. During this meeting, the prize winner(s) will give a one-hour lecture.

The SCW prize medal "La Pensée" ("The Thought") is due to Raymond Delamarre (1890-1986), a rather well-known French sculptor associated with what has been called "Art Deco" (Chrysler Building and Empire State Building in New York, the architects Mallet-Stevens or Le Corbusier in France). He is in particular famous for his work at the entrance of the Suez Canal. A web site: www.atelier-raymond-delamarre.fr.



PAST LAUREATES :

2014: VINCENT CONITZER and TIM ROUGHGARDEN

2012 : LARS EHLERS and ADAM MEIROWITZ

2010 :  FRANZ DIETRICH and CHRISTIAN LIST

2008 :  TAYFUN SOMNEZ

2006  : JOHN DUGGAN

2004 :  FRANCOIS MANIQUET

2002 : MATTHEW JACKSON

Kuznets' Nobel Prize medal auction

The auction of the medal that Simon Kuznets received with his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1971 ended this evening.

The auction had a minimum bid of $150,000, and a soft close, i.e. the closing time was extended for 30 minutes (I think) beyond the last bid. All the bids were made on the last day, and the auction was extended for several bids before reaching the final price of $385,848.

Tomas Sjostrom on the Nobel Economics Prize committee

The Daily Targum, the student newspaper of Rutgers university, talks to Tomas Sjostrom about his work as a member of the committee that selects the recipients for the Nobel Economics Prize.
Professor details dual role as Nobel Prize Committee member

"in February, Sjostrom and his colleague on the committee will start to go through the extensive list of promising candidates.
“After reducing the list to reasonable nominations, we discuss the candidates [for] meetings after meetings as the spring goes on,” Sjostrom said. "

2014 CME Group - MSRI Prize to Jose Sheinkman

Congratulations (a bit belated) to Jose Sheinkman

 2014 CME Group-MSRI Prize announced!

The 9th annual CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications will be awarded to JOSÉ A. SCHEINKMAN, the Edwin W. Rickert Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Theodore A. Wells ‘29 Professor of Economics (emeritus) at Princeton University and a Research Associate at the NBER at a luncheon in Chicago on February 9.  By invitation only.

Prior to the lunch and award presentation, a panel discussion on "Bubbles in the market: Why do they form, when do they pop?" will be held with Gadi Barlevy (Senior Economist and Research Advisor, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago), Lars Hansen (David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics & the College, University of Chicago), Harrison Hong (John Scully 1966 Professor of Economics and Finance, Department of Economics, Princeton University), Leonid Kogan (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management), Pietro Veronesi (Roman Family Professor of Finance, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago), and Wei Xiong (Hugh Leander and Mary Trumbull Adams Professor in Finance and Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University).  The panel will be moderated by David Eisenbud (Director, MSRI and Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley)

The annual CME Group-MSRI Prize is awarded to an individual or a group, to recognize originality and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics.