IJCAI-24 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) and Sarit Kraus (2023).

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 . Professor Dietterich 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.

IJCAI-24 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) and Pin-Yu Chen (2023).

The winner of the 2024 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Nisarg Shah, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada.  Dr. Shah 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.
 

IJCAI-24 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) and Dieter Fox (2023).

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.
 

Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award:

The IJCAI Distinguished Service Award was established in 1979 by the IJCAI Trustees to honor senior scientists in AI for contributions and service to the field during their careers. Previous recipients have been: Bernard Meltzer (1979), Arthur Samuel (1983), Donald Walker (1989), Woodrow Bledsoe (1991), Daniel G. Bobrow (1993), Wolfgang Bibel (1999), Barbara Grosz (2001), Alan Bundy (2003), Raj Reddy (2005), Ronald J. Brachman (2007), Luigia Carlucci Aiello (2009), Raymond C. Perrault (2011), Wolfgang Wahlster (2013), Anthony G. Cohn (2015), Erik Sandewall (2016), Ramon Lopez de Mantaras (2017), Craig Knoblock (2018), Francesca Rossi (2019), Toby Walsh (2020), Steven Minton (2021),  Bernhard Nebel (2022) and Qiang Yang (2023).

At IJCAI-24, the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award will be given to Maria Gini, Professor, CSE Distinguished Professor, Distinguished University Teaching Professor, University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Professor Gini is recognized for her substantial contributions, as well as her extensive service to the field of Artificial Intelligence throughout her career.