The winner of the 2018 Award for Research Excellence is Jitrenda Malik, (link to https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~malik/) Arthur J. Chick Professor of EECS at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Malik is recognized for the fundamental advances in computer vision.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) and Andrew Barto (2017).

The winner of the 2018 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Stefano Ermon, (link to https://cs.stanford.edu/~ermon/ ) Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. Professor Ermon is recognized for his foundational work on probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, and decision making, with a range of novel applications in areas with broad societal impact.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) and Devi Parikh (2017).

The winner of the 2018 John McCarthy Award is Milind Tambe, (link to http://teamcore.usc.edu/tambe/) Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering and Professor of Computer Science & Industrial and Systems Engineering Departments of the University of South California. Professor Tambe is recognized for research and development of important practical applications of AI and multi-agent systems for social good.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) and Dan Roth (2017).

EurAI AI Dissertation Award 2017

Winner

New Perspectives on Cost Partitioning for Optimal Classical Planning
Florian Pommerening

Honourable mentions

Advances in Abstract Argumentation – Expressiveness and Dynamics
Thomas Linsbichler

Joint Perceptual Learning and Natural Language Acquisition for Autonomous Robots
Muhannad Alomari