Congratulations to the #IJCAI2025 award winners

Image credit: Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash.

The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced. These three distinctions are: the Award for Research Excellence, the Computers and Thought Award and the John McCarthy Award.

IJCAI-25 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.

The winner of the 2025 Award for Research Excellence is Rina Dechter, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA . Professor Dechter is recognized for her seminal contributions to the fields of constraint satisfaction and probabilistic inference, including novel algorithmic frameworks, modeling ideas, complexity analyses, and unifying principles.

IJCAI-25 Computers and Thought Award

This award is presented to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence.

The winner of the 2025 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Aditya Grover, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UCLA and Co-founder, Inception Labs, USA. Dr Grover is recognized for his foundational contributions uniting deep generative models, representation learning, and reinforcement learning, and for their applications in advancing scientific reasoning.

IJCAI-25 John McCarthy Award

This 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.

The winner of the 2025 John McCarthy Award is Cynthia Rudin, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Duke University USA. Professor Rudin is recognized for her foundational contributions to trustworthy AI, with field-defining work in interpretable machine learning and transformative impact on high-stakes societal applications.

The IJCAI-25 awards selection committee: Christian Bessiere, Diego Calvanese, Luc De Raedt, Edith Elkind, Bo Li, Zhi-Hua Zhou.

Find out more about the awards here.