Congratulations to the #AAAI2026 award winners

A number of prestigious AAAI awards were presented during the official opening ceremony of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026) in Singapore, on Thursday 22 January. The winners are as follows:

2026 AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for Humanity

The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for 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 Shakir Mohamed (Google Deepmind, UK). Shakir has been recognised for “significant contributions to maximizing social benefit by empowering communities worldwide to learn, contribute, debate, and shape how AI is used”.

2026 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 Ashok Goel (Georgia Institute of Technology) for “pioneering research contributions to biologically inspired design, case-based reasoning and applications of AI in virtual teaching, as well as for extensive contributions to AAAI, including service as Editor-in-Chief of AI Magazine”.

2026 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 2026 winners are Alan Mackworth and David Poole (both University of British Columbia) for “creating resources that make high-quality AI education accessible to students worldwide, including a freely available textbook, open source Python code, and web-based teaching tools”.

2026 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 David E. Smith, for “outstanding contributions and sustained service to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, both in supporting and improving its internal processes and in overall management of its financial assets”.

2026 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 2026 award was given to the two most influential papers from the Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which took place in 2011.

The winners are:

• Antoine Bordes, Jason Weston, Ronan Collobert and Yoshua Bengio for their paper “Learning Structured Embeddings of Knowledge Bases”.
• Stefanie Tellex, Thomas Kollar, Steven Dickerson, Matthew Walter, Ashis Banerjee, Seth Teller and Nicholas Roy for their paper “Understanding Natural Language Commands for Robotic Navigation and Mobile Manipulation”.

2025 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award

AAAI and ACM SIGAI established the Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award to recognize and encourage superior research and writing by doctoral candidates in artificial intelligence.

This year there were two winners:

• Akari Asai (University of Washington), for the dissertation titled “Beyond Scaling: Frontiers of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models”.
• Noah Golowich (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), for the dissertation titled “Theoretical Foundations for Learning in Games and Dynamic Environments”.

There were also three honourable mentions:

• Sarah Alyami (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals), for the dissertation titled “Continuous Sign Language Recognition: Dataset Development and Novel Frameworks”.
• Thom Badings (Radboud University), for the dissertation titled “Robust Verification of Stochastic Systems: Guarantees in the Presence of Uncertainty”.
• Brian Hu Zhang (Carnegie Mellon University), for the dissertation titled “New Solution Concepts and Algorithms for Equilibrium Computation and Learning in Extensive-Form Games and Beyond”.

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.