Celebrating ACM's 2019 & 2020 Award Recipients: ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award

November 1, 2021

The surge of the COVID-19 delta variant, international travel restrictions and restrictions on indoor gatherings forced ACM to cancel its Awards Banquet planned for October 23, 2021.

We continue our series of emails containing videos highlighting the achievements of the 2019 and 2020 Award recipients that were prepared for the Banquet.

Click on the image below to view a short video about the 2019 and 2020 recipients of the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award.

click to view video

The Newell Award is presented to individuals selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. It is accompanied by a $10,000 prize provided by ACM and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and by individual contributions.

2019 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award

The 2019 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to Lydia E. Kavraki of Rice University and Daphne Koller of Insitro and Stanford University. Kavraki is recognized for pioneering contributions to robotic motion planning and their applications in bioinformatics and biomedicine, including the invention of randomized motion planning algorithms and probabilistic roadmaps. Koller is recognized for pioneering contributions to machine learning and probabilistic models, the application of these techniques to biology and human health, and for contributions to democratizing education.
2020 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award

The 2020 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to Hector Levesque of University of Toronto and Moshe Vardi of Rice University. Levesque is recognized for fundamental contributions to knowledge representation and reasoning, and their broader influence within theoretical computer science, databases, robotics, and the study of Boolean satisfiability. Vardi is recognized for important contributions to the development of logic as a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems.

ACM welcomes nominations for candidates whose work exemplifies the best and most influential contributions to our community, and society at large. More information on nominating candidates for future awards is available on the ACM Awards website here.