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.
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 2024 Award for Research Excellence is Thomas Dietterich, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) and Director of Intelligent Systems, Institute for Collaborative Robotics and Intelligence Systems (CoRIS), Oregon State University, USA. Thomas is recognized for his pioneering work in machine learning, sequential decision-making, safe deployment of machine learning systems, applications to real-world problems in ecosystem management, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in machine learning.
This award is presented to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence.
The winner of the 2024 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Nisarg Shah, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada. Nisarg is recognized for his contributions to AI and society, in particular foundational work on the theory of algorithmic fairness using principles from social choice theory.
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 2024 John McCarthy Award is David Blei, Professor of Statistics and Computer Science, Columbia University, USA. Professor Blei is recognized for his groundbreaking work in machine learning, in particular his field-defining contributions in the areas of topic models and stochastic variational inference.
The IJCAI-24 awards selection committee: Christian Bessiere, Diego Calvanese, Luc De Raedt, Edith Elkind, James Kwok, Zhi-Hua Zhou.
Find out more about the awards here.