The winners of three IJCAI awards have been announced. These three distinctions are: the Award for Research Excellence, the John McCarthy Award and the Computers and Thought Award.
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.
The winner of the 2021 Award for Research Excellence is Richard Sutton (University of Alberta). Richard is recognized for his fundamental contributions to the foundation of reinforcement learning.
This award is presented to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence.
The winner of the 2021 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Fei Fang (Carnegie Mellon University). Fei is recognized for her contributions to integrating machine learning with game theory and the use of these novel techniques to tackle societal challenges, such as more effective deployment of security resources, enhancing environmental sustainability, and reducing food insecurity.
This 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.
The winner of the 2021 John McCarthy Award is Tuomas Sandholm (Carnegie Mellon University). Thomas is recognized for his significant research contributions to multiagent systems, computational economics, optimization and game playing, and their application in real-world settings.
The recipients were selected on the recommendation of the IJCAI-21 Awards Selection Committee:
Thomas Eiter, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Maria Gini, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA
Luc De Raedt, KU Leuven, Belgium
Dan Roth, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Chengqi Zhang, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China (Chair)