Kate Larson, Associate Professor with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science has been named an Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher by the Canadian Association of Computer Science. This award recognizes excellence in Computer Science research by an academic researchers within 10 years of finishing their PhD.
Larson joins Ondrej Lhotak (2013), Ian Goldberg (2010) and Professor Bin Ma (2009) in a growing list of distinguished faculty members who have won this researcher prize.
Larson's research interests fall in the area of artificial intelligence with an emphasis on self-interested multiagent systems and how agents interact. The overarching theme of her research is strategic reasoning in computational settings. She is interested in understanding how ideas from game theory, mechanism design and microeconomics can be used to model and design systems for intelligent agents, as well as in studying the effect that computational limitations have on strategic behaviour, with the aim of reconciling some of the conflicts that arise between computational and game-theoretic constraints.