Congratulations to the #AAAI2025 award winners

A number of prestigious AAAI awards were presented during the official opening ceremony of the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025) on 27 February. Some of the winners will also be giving invited talks as part of the programme.

2025 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 Stuart J. Russell (University of California, Berkeley, USA). Stuart has been recognised for “work on the conceptual and theoretical foundations of provably beneficial AI and his leadership in creating the field of AI safety”.

2025 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 Christoph Schuhmann (Laion e.V.) for “the outstanding contribution to the AI community as the initiator and founder of LAION, the non-profit organization that provides open and free datasets, tools and models”.

AAAI Feigenbaum Prize

The AAAI Feigenbaum Prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding artificial intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science.

The 2025 prize has been awarded to:

• Thomas G. Dietterich (Oregon State University) for “high-impact contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through innovations in machine learning and sequential decision-making with applications in environmental sustainability, ecosystem informatics, drug design, and intelligent desktop assistants”.
• James Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) for “ground-breaking contributions to knowledge representation, planning, and the Semantic Web”.

2025 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 2025 winner is Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State 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”.

2025 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 Yolanda Gil (University of Southern California, USA), for “outstanding contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through sustained service to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and significant leadership in broadening the research community”.

2025 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 2025 award is given to the most influential paper from the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

The winners this year are Tom Mitchell, Andrew Carlson, Justin Betteridge, Bryan Kisiel, Burr Settles and Estevam Hruschka for their paper “Toward an Architecture for Never-Ending Language 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.