Congratulations to the #IJCAI2026 award winners

Image credit: Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash.

The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced. These three distinctions are: the Award for Research Excellence, the Computers and Thought Award and the John McCarthy Award.

IJCAI-26 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.

The winner of the 2026 Award for Research Excellence is Nicholas R. Jennings, Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University, UK. Professor Jennings is recognized for his seminal contributions to the field of multi-agent systems, including algorithms for multi-agent coordination and the principles of human-agent teamwork, and for his pioneering applications of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

IJCAI-26 Computers and Thought Award

This award is presented to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence.

The winner of the 2026 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Jiajun Wu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, of Psychology at Stanford University. Dr Wu is recognized for his foundational contributions across computer vision, generative AI, and robotics, uniting neural and symbolic representations to build machines that understand and interact with the physical world.

IJCAI-26 John McCarthy Award

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 2026 John McCarthy Award is David C. Parkes, John A. Paulson Dean George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University. Professor Parkes is recognized for his foundational contributions to the interface of AI and economics, specifically for pioneering algorithmic mechanisms that ensure efficiency, fairness, and incentive alignment in high-stakes multi-agent environments.

The IJCAI-26 awards selection committee: Bo An, Diego Calvanese, James Kwok, Kate Larson, Michael Thielscher, Zhi-Hua Zhou.

Find out more about the awards here.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.