IJCAI Awards – Call for Nominations

Deadline for nominations: Friday, January 10, 2020

IJCAI calls for nominations for its 2020 awards. These awards include Research Excellence Award, Computer and Thought Award, John McCarthy Award and Donald E. Walker Award for Distinguished Services. The 2020 IJCAI Award Committee Chair is Professor Qiang Yang of WeBank and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

How to Make Nominations

Nominations for IJCAI awards may be made by any member of the AI community. Nominations should take the form of a **single** PDF document, uploaded to the relevant nomination web site (see below). The nomination should on the first page clearly state the name of the candidate being nominated, their email address and website (if available), and the name and contact details of the nomination coordinator. The nomination should contain a statement (no more than 2000 words) clearly setting out why the nominee is deserving of the award. The nomination should also contain letters of support from up to 3 supporters from the AI community, who should also clearly state why they believe the nominee is deserving of the award (each supporting statement should be no more than 1000 words, and should identify the supporter).

Websites for uploading nominations (by Jan 10, 2020):

Nominations must be uploaded no later than: ***Friday, JANUARY 10, 2020*** Nominations received after this deadline will not be considered. Informal enquiries or points for clarification may be sent to the chair of the IJCAI-2020 awards committee: Qiang Yang “qyang at ust dot hk” (subject line: “IJCAI 2020 Awards”).

IJCAI-20 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. Past recipients of this honor are the most illustrious group of scientists from the field of Artificial Intelligence.

They are: John McCarthy (1985), Allen Newell (1989), Marvin Minsky (1991), Raymond Reiter (1993), Herbert Simon (1995), Aravind Joshi (1997), Judea Pearl (1999), Donald Michie (2001), Nils Nilsson (2003), Geoffrey E. Hinton (2005), Alan Bundy (2007), Victor Lesser (2009), Robert Anthony Kowalski (2011), Hector Levesque (2013), Barbara Grosz (2015), Michael I. Jordan (2016), Andrew Barto (2017) and Jitendra Malik (2018), Yoav Shoham (2019)

IJCAI-20 Computers and Thought Award:

The Computers and Thought Award is presented at IJCAI conferences to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. The award was established with royalties received from the book, Computers and Thought, edited by Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman. It is currently supported by income from IJCAI funds. Past recipients of this honor have been:

Terry Winograd (1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas Lenat (1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981), Tom Mitchell (1983), Hector Levesque (1985), Johan de Kleer (1987), Henry Kautz (1989), Rodney Brooks (1991), Martha Pollack (1991), Hiroaki Kitano (1993), Sarit Kraus (1995), Stuart Russell (1995), Leslie Kaelbling (1997), Nicholas Jennings (1999), Daphne Koller (2001), Tuomas Sandholm (2003), Peter Stone (2007), Carlos Guestrin (2009), Andrew Ng (2009),Vincent Conitzer (2011), Malte Helmert (2011), Kristen Grauman (2013), Ariel Procaccia (2015), Percy Liang (2016), Devi Parikh (2017) and Stefano Ermon (2018), Guy Van den Broeck (2019)

IJCAI-20 John McCarthy Award:

The IJCAI John McCarthy 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. Nominees of the award will have made significant contributions to the research agenda in their area and will have a first-rate profile of influential research results.

The award is named for John McCarthy (1927-2011), who is widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. As well as giving the discipline its name, McCarthy made fundamental contributions of lasting importance to computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular, including time-sharing operating systems, the LISP programming languages, knowledge representation, common-sense reasoning, and the logicist paradigm in artificial intelligence.

The award was established with the full support and encouragement of the McCarthy family.

Past recipients of this honor have been: Bart Selman (2015), Moshe Tennenholtz (2016), Dan Roth (2017), Milind Tambe (2018), Pedro Domingos (2019).