The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is a biannual award before given at the IJCAI conference to researcher in artificial intelligence as a recognition of excellence of their career. Beginning in 2016, the conference is held annually and so is the award.

Laureates

The recipients of this award have been:

• John McCarthy (1985)
• Allen Newell (1989)
• Marvin Minsky (1991)
• Raymond Reiter (1993)
• Herbert A. Simon (1995)
• Aravind Joshi (1997)
• Judea Pearl (1999)
• Donald Michie (2001)
• Nils Nilsson (2003)
• Geoffrey E. Hinton (2005)
• Alan Bundy (2007)
• Victor R. Lesser (2009)
• Robert Kowalski (2011)
• Hector Levesque (2013)
• Barbara Grosz (2015)

for her pioneering research in Natural Language Processing and in theories and applications of Multiagent Collaboration. ^[1]

• Michael I. Jordan (2016)

for his groundbreaking and impactful research in both the theory and application of statistical machine learning. ^[2]

• Andrew Barto (2017)

for his pioneering work in the theory of reinforcement learning.

• Jitendra Malik (2018)
• Yoav Shoham (2019)
• Eugene Freuder (2020)
• Richard S. Sutton (2021)
• Stuart J. Russell (2022)
• Sarit Kraus (2023)

for her pioneering work of the study of interactions among self-interested agents, creating the field of automated negotiation, and developing methods for coalition formation and teamwork, both as formal models and real-world implementations.^[3]

Winners of also Turing Award

• John McCarthy (1971)
• Allen Newell (1975)
• Marvin Minsky (1969)
• Herbert A. Simon (1975)
• Judea Pearl (2011)
• Geoffrey Hinton (2018)