IJCAI-23 Awards Announcement

The IJCAI-23 Award for Research Excellence, the John McCarthy Award and the Computers and Thought Award are awarded by the IJCAI Board of Trustees, upon recommendation by the IJCAI-23 Awards Selection Committee, which consists this year of

Thomas Eiter, Vienna University of Technology, AUSTRIA
Maria Gini,University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA (Chair)
James Kwok , Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, CHINA
Luc De Raedt, KU Leuven, BELGIUM
Dan Roth. University of Pennsylvania, USA
Chengqi Zhang, University of Technology Sydney, AUSTRALIA

The IJCAI Awards Selection Committee receives advice from members of the IJCAI-23 Awards Review Committee, who comment on the accuracy of the nomination material and provide additional information about the nominees. The IJCAI-23 Awards Review Committee is the union of the former Trustees of IJCAI, the IJCAI-23 Advisory Committee, the Program Chairs of the last three IJCAI conferences, and the past recipients of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award, with nominees excluded

IJCAI-23 Award for Research Excellence:

The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. Past recipients of this honor are the most illustrious group of scientists from the field of Artificial Intelligence.
They are: John McCarthy (1985), Allen Newell (1989), Marvin Minsky (1991), Raymond Reiter (1993), Herbert Simon (1995), Aravind Joshi (1997), Judea Pearl (1999), Donald Michie (2001), Nils Nilsson (2003), Geoffrey E. Hinton (2005), Alan Bundy (2007), Victor Lesser (2009), Robert Anthony Kowalski (2011), Hector Levesque (2013), Barbara Grosz (2015), Michael I. Jordan (2016), Andrew Barto (2017), Jitendra Malik (2018), Yoav Shoham (2019), Eugene Freuder (2020), Richard Sutton (2021) and Stuart Russel (2022).

The winner of the 2023 Award for Research Excellence is Sarit Kraus, Professor of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Professor Kraus is recognized for her pioneering work of the study of interactions among self-interested agents, creating the field of automated negotiation, and developing methods for coalition formation and teamwork, both as formal models and real-world implementations.

IJCAI-23 Computers and Thought Award:

The Computers and Thought Award is presented at IJCAI conferences to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. The award was established with royalties received from the book, Computers and Thought, edited by Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman. It is currently supported by income from IJCAI funds. Past recipients of this honor have been: Terry Winograd (1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas Lenat (1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981), Tom Mitchell (1983), Hector Levesque (1985), Johan de Kleer (1987), Henry Kautz (1989), Rodney Brooks (1991), Martha Pollack (1991), Hiroaki Kitano (1993), Sarit Kraus (1995), Stuart Russell (1995), Leslie Kaelbling (1997), Nicholas Jennings (1999), Daphne Koller (2001), Tuomas Sandholm (2003), Peter Stone (2007), Carlos Guestrin (2009), Andrew Ng (2009),Vincent Conitzer (2011), Malte Helmert (2011), Kristen Grauman (2013), Ariel Procaccia (2015), Percy Liang (2016), Devi Parikh (2017), Stefano Ermon (2018), Guy Van den Broeck (2019), Piotr Skowron (2020), Fei Fang (2021) and Bo Li (2022).

The winner of the 2023 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Pin-Yu Chen, IBM, USA. Dr. Chen is recognized for his contributions to consolidating properties of trust, robustness and safety into rigorous algorithmic procedures and computable metrics for improving AI systems.

IJCAI-23 John McCarthy Award:

The IJCAI John McCarthy Award is intended to recognize established mid-career researchers, typically between fifteen to twenty-five years after obtaining their PhD, that have built up a major track record of research excellence in artificial intelligence. Nominees of the award will have made significant contributions to the research agenda in their area and will have a first-rate profile of influential research results.
The award is named for John McCarthy (1927-2011), who is widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. As well as giving the discipline its name, McCarthy made fundamental contributions of lasting importance to computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular, including time-sharing operating systems, the LISP programming languages, knowledge representation, common-sense reasoning, and the logicist paradigm in artificial intelligence.
The award was established with the full support and encouragement of the McCarthy family.
Past recipients of this honor have been: Bart Selman (2015), Moshe Tennenholtz (2016), Dan Roth (2017), Milind Tambe (2018), Pedro Domingos (2019), Daniela Rus (2020), Tuomas Sandholm (2021) and Michael L. Littman (2022).

The winner of the 2023 John McCarthy Award is Dieter Fox, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, USA. Professor Fox is recognized for his fundamental contributions to robotics, pioneering Bayesian state estimation, the use of depth cameras for activity recognition, and developing powerful machine learning techniques for perception and manipulation.

Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award:

The IJCAI Distinguished Service Award was established in 1979 by the IJCAI Trustees to honor senior scientists in AI for contributions and service to the field during their careers. Previous recipients have been: Bernard Meltzer (1979), Arthur Samuel (1983), Donald Walker (1989), Woodrow Bledsoe (1991), Daniel G. Bobrow (1993), Wolfgang Bibel (1999), Barbara Grosz (2001), Alan Bundy (2003), Raj Reddy (2005), Ronald J. Brachman (2007), Luigia Carlucci Aiello (2009), Raymond C. Perrault (2011), Wolfgang Wahlster (2013), Anthony G. Cohn (2015), Erik Sandewall (2016), Ramon Lopez de Mantaras (2017), Craig Knoblock (2018), Francesca Rossi (2019), Toby Walsh (2020), Steven Minton (2021) and Bernhard Nebel (2022).
At IJCAI-23, the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award will be given to Qiang Yang, Chair Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China and Chief AI Officer of the WeBank, Shenzhen, China. Professor Yang is recognized for his substantial contributions, as well as his extensive service to the IJCAI Organization and the entire field of Artificial Intelligence throughout his career.