IJCAI calls for nominations for its 2026 awards. These awards include the Computers and Thought Award, the John McCarthy Award, and the Research Excellence Award. The 2026 IJCAI Award Committee Chair is Zhi-Hua Zhou, Nanjing University, China.
The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2026.
Nominations for IJCAI awards may be made by any member of the AI community. Nominations must be submitted through the Chairingtool (https://chairingtool.com/conferences/IJCAIECAI2026/awards?role=author). The nominator must first register in the system. Once registered, the nominator can submit the nomination, which consists of a few fields to fill and a nomination file to upload.
The nomination file must be in PDF. It should contain a statement (no more than 2000 words) clearly specifying why the nominee is deserving of the award. The nomination file 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).
Computers and Thought Award
The Computers and Thought Award is presented to outstanding young scientists in Artificial Intelligence. Nominees for the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award should have received their PhD within the last 7 years at the date of the IJCAI conference. The eligibility period can be extended beyond 7 years for the following properly documented circumstances occurring after the Ph.D. defense: parenting leave, national service, or other exceptional circumstances.
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, who 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.
Research Excellence 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 recipient is expected to have served as mentor and role model in their field. Past recipients of this honor are the most illustrious group of scientists from the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Past Recipients
Past recipients of the Computers and Thought Award: 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).
Past recipients of the John McCarthy Award: 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).
Past recipients of the Research Excellence Award: 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 Charles Freuder (2020), Richard Sutton (2021), Stuart Russell (2022), Sarit Kraus (2023), Thomas Dietterich (2024), and Rina Dechter (2025).
Informal inquiries or requests for clarification should be sent to: Zhi-Hua Zhou <zhouzh@nju.edu.cn> (subject line: “2026 IJCAI Awards”).
Information on the awards is at https://www.ijcai.org/awards