Congratulations to the #AAAI2024 award winners

A number of prestigious awards were announced shortly before the start of AAAI 2024, and will be officially presented during an awards ceremony at the conference, on 24 February. Some of the winners will also be giving invited talks as part of the programme.

2024 AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity

The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity recognises the positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects.

The winner of this year’s award is Milind Tambe (Harvard University/Google Research). Milind has been recognised for “ground-breaking applications of novel AI techniques to public safety and security, conservation, and public health, benefiting humanity on an international scale”.

2024 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award

The Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award recognises outstanding contributions to automated planning, machine learning and robotics, their application to real-world problems and extensive service to the AI community.

This year’s award goes to Raquel Urtasun (University of Toronto) for her “outstanding contribution to machine learning, computer vision, and entrepreneurship in the field of autonomous driving”.

2024 AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award

The annual AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award was created to honour a person (or group of people) who has made major contributions to AI education that provide long-lasting benefits to the AI community and society as a whole.

The 2024 winners are Charles Isbell (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Michael L. Littman (Brown University) for “innovative teaching of AI and machine learning through online courses reaching many thousands of students and through creative, entertaining outreach to the general public”.

2024 AAAI Distinguished Service Award

The AAAI Distinguished Service award recognizes one individual each year for extraordinary service to the AI community.

The winner this year is Ashok Goel, for “outstanding service to the field of artificial intelligence through extensive leadership, especially as Editor-in-Chief of AI Magazine and Founding Editor of the Interactive AI Magazine, and for sustained interdisciplinary scholarship on education in AI and AI in education”.

2024 AAAI Classic Paper Award

The AAAI Classic Paper award honours the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most influential, chosen from a specific conference year. The 2024 award is given to the most influential paper from the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

The winners this year are Brian Ziebart, Andrew Maas, Andrew Bagnell and Anind Dey for their paper “Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning”.

Congratulations to all of the winners! You can find out more about these awards, and the other awards that AAAI bestows here.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.