IJCAI-26 Awards Announcement
The IJCAI-26 Award for Research Excellence, the John McCarthy Award and the Computers and Thought Award are awarded by the IJCAI Board of Trustees, upon recommendation by the IJCAI-26 Awards Selection Committee, which consists this year of
- Bo An, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, ITALY
- James Kwok, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
- Kate Larson, University of Waterloo, Canada
- Michael Thielscher, University of New South Wales, Australia
- Zhi-Hua Zhou, Nanjing University, China (Chair)
The IJCAI Awards Selection Committee receives advice from members of the IJCAI-26 Awards Review Committee, who comment on the accuracy of the nomination material and provide additional information about the nominees. The IJCAI-26 Awards Review Committee is the union of the former Trustees of IJCAI, the IJCAI-26 Advisory Committee, the Program Chairs of the last three IJCAI conferences, and the past recipients of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award, with nominees excluded.
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. 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), Jitendra Malik (2018), Yoav Shoham (2019), Eugene Freuder (2020), Richard Sutton (2021), Stuart Russell (2022), Sarit Kraus (2023), Thomas Dietterich (2024) and Rina Dechter (2025).
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:
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), Stefano Ermon (2018), Guy Van den Broeck (2019), Piotr Skowron (2020), Fei Fang (2021), Bo Li (2022), Pin-Yu Chen (2023), Nisarg Shah (2024) and Aditya Grover (2025).
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:
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), Daniela Rus (2020), Tuomas Sandholm (2021), Michael L. Littman (2022), Dieter Fox (2023), David Blei (2024) and Cynthia Rudin (2025).
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.