The premier award in the world in the field of artificial intelligence is the IJCAI Research Excellence Award. IJCAI is the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. We are delighted to announce that the winner of the IJCAI Research Excellence Award 2020 is our own Professor Eugene C. Freuder for his pioneering research in constraint-based reasoning and problem solving.
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: 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), and Yoav Shoham (2019). The founding fathers of the field of AI are included in this list.
Of the 19 previous winners, 6 also won the ACM Turing Award, regarded as the Nobel Prize in Computer Science (John McCarthy, Allen Newell, Marvin Minsky, Herbert Simon, Judea Pearl, and Geoffrey Hinton). Herb Simon also won the Nobel Prize in Economics (1978).
Congratulations to Gene on a very well-deserved recognition of his scientific achievements throughout his career.
Gene is based at Insight in UCC and was the founding director of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre. He is Professor Emeritus, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork.
