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AAAI Classic Paper Award - AAAI

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Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

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AAAI Classic Paper Award

The AAAI Classic Paper award honors the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most influential, chosen from a specific conference year. Each year, the time period considered will advance by one year. The 2025 award will be given to the most influential paper(s) from the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Papers will be judged on the basis of impact, for example:

  • Started a new research (sub)area
  • Led to important applications
  • Answered a long-standing question/issue or clarified what had been murky
  • Made a major advance that figures in the history of the subarea
  • Has been picked up as important and used by other areas within (or outside of) AI
  • Has been very heavily cited

All members of the artificial intelligence community are encouraged to submit nominations for this award. Candidacy is not limited to AAAI members, nor to people still active in artificial intelligence. Posthumous awards will be considered.

Nominations will be reviewed by the AAAI Awards Committee. Nominations are due September 20, 2024.

The award will be presented at the AAAI-25 conference in Philadelphia, PA, USA. A total of $1,000 in travel support is available to enable the author(s) to travel to the conference to accept the award in person.

For more information regarding these awards, please contact AAAI (awards@aaai.org).

2024

  • Classic Paper Recipients: Brian Ziebart, Andrew Maas, Andrew Bagnell, Anind Dey
    Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning
    For introducing entropy regularization to Reinforcement Learning that led to improvements in predictive accuracy of forecasting, imitation learning, decision making, and Human-AI alignment.

Past Recipients

2023

  • Classic Paper Recipients: Kenny Daniel, Alex Nash, Sven Koenig, and Ariel Felner
    Theta*: Any-Angle Path Planning on Grids

2022

  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Michael Montemerlo, Sebastian Thrun, Hendrik Dahlkamp, David Stavens, Sven Strohband
    Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge with an AI Robot presented at the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
    For breaking barriers in autonomous land vehicles through innovations in probabilistic reasoning to address sensor noise and path planning to control driving parameters.
  • Classic Paper Honorable Mention Recipients: Rada Mihalcea, Courtney Corley, and Carlo Strapparava
    Corpus-Based and Knowledge-Based Measures of Text Semantic Similarity presented at the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA
    For pioneering work on using word semantics to assess text similarity.

2021

  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Domenico Lembo, Maurizio Lenzerini, and Riccardo Rosati
    DL-Lite: Tractable Description Logics for Ontologies presented at the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 2005 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
    For proposing basic knowledge representation languages with low complexity of reasoning that have had significant impact beyond AI into semantic foundations for the Web.

2020

2019

  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Prem Melville, Raymond J. Mooney, and Ramadass Nagarajan
    Content-Boosted Collaborative Filtering for Improved Recommendations presented at the Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 2002 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
    For showing a way to complement content-based and collaborative filtering approaches in recommendation systems.
  • Classic Paper Honorable Mention Recipients: Sven Koenig and Maxim Likhachev
    D*Lite presented at the Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 2002 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
    For developing an incremental heuristic search algorithm for robot navigation in unknown terrain that is easy to understand, analyze and extend.

2018

  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Natasha Noy and Mark A. Musen
    PROMPT: Algorithm and Tool for Automated Ontology Merging and Alignment presented at the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2000), Austin, Texas, USA
    For pioneering ontology matching and integration research, by identifying the specifics of the problem and providing a first innovative solution.

2017

  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Dieter Fox, Wolfram Burgard, Frank Dellaert, and Sebastian Thrun
    Monte Carlo Localization: Efficient Position Estimation for Mobile Robots presented at the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), Orlando, Florida, USA
    For pioneering the application of particle filtering to provide an effective and scalable method for robot localization.
  • Classic Paper Honorable Mention Recipients: Nathaniel Good, J. Ben Schafer, Joseph A. Konstan, Al Borchers, Badrul Sarwar, Jon Herlocker, and John Riedl
    Combining Collaborative Filtering with Personal Agents for Better Recommendations presented at the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), Orlando, Florida, USA
    For developing an effective way to combine collaborative filtering and content filtering to provide better recommendations to users.
  • Classic Paper Honorable Mention Recipients: Ellen Riloff and Rosie Jones
    Learning Dictionaries for Information Extraction by Multi-Level Bootstrapping presented at the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), Orlando, Florida, USA
    For introducing a mutual bootstrapping technique for information extraction that simultaneously learns the semantic lexicon and the extraction patterns.

2016

  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Wolfram Burgard, Armin B. Cremers, Dieter Fox, Dirk Hähnel, Gerhard Lakemeyer, Dirk Schulz, Walter Steiner, and Sebastian Thrun
    The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Presented at the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98), Madison, Wisconsin, USA
    For significant contributions to probabilistic robot navigation and the integration with high-level planning methods.
  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Carla P. Gomes, Bart Selman, and Henry Kautz
    Boosting Combinatorial Search through Randomization Presented at the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98), Madison, Wisconsin, USA
    For significant contributions to the area of automated reasoning and constraint solving through the introduction of randomization and restarts into complete solvers.

2015

  • Classic Paper Award Recipient: Eugene Charniak
    Statistical Parsing with a Context-Free Grammar and Word Statistics presented at the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97), Providence, Rhode Island, USA
    For significant contributions to sentence parsing and language models based on probabilities of possible alternative parses.
  • Honorable Mention Corecipients: Roberto J. Bayardo Jr. and Robert C. Schrag
    Using CSP Look-Back Techniques to Solve Real-World SAT Instances presented at the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97), Providence, Rhode Island, USA
    For significant contributions to enhance proof procedures for propositional satisfiability on large instances of real-world problems.

2014

  • Classic Paper Award Recipients: Michael J. Pazzani, Jack Muramatsu, and Daniel Billsus
    Syskill & Webert: Identifying Interesting Web Sites presented at the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), Portland, Oregon, USA
    For significant contributions to the field of personalizing Internet content and learning user profiles.
  • Honorable Mention Corecipients: Wolfram Burgard, Dieter Fox, Daniel Hennig, and Timo Schmidt
    Estimating the Absolute Position of a Mobile Robot Using Position Probability Grids presented at the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), Portland, Oregon, USA
    For significant contributions to solving the problem of self-localization of mobile robots.
  • Honorable Mention Corecipients: Henry Kautz and Bart Selman
    Pushing the Envelope: Planning, Propositional Logic, and Stochastic Search presented at the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), Portland, Oregon, USA
    For establishing satisfiability testing as a wide-ranging method for solving planning problems.

2013

  • Classic Paper Award Recipient: Jean-Charles Rëgin
    A Filtering Algorithm for Constraints of Difference in CSPs presented at the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), Seattle, Washington, USA
    For groundbreaking contributions to constraint programming via the development of one of the first propagators for global constraints.
  • Classic Paper Award Corecipients: Anthony R. Cassandra, Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Michael L. Littman
    Acting Optimally in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains presented at the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), Seattle, Washington, USA
    For significant contributions to the application of POMDP models in AI and to practical algorithms for their solution.

2012

  • Classic Paper Award Corecipients: Pattie Maes and Robyn Kozierok
    Learning Interface Agents presented at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-93), Washington, DC, USA
    Citation: For highlighting directions and opportunities with harnessing machine learning and inference in automated personal assistance and human-computer interaction.
  • Honorable Mention Corecipients: Christian Bessiere and Marie-Odile Cordier
    Arc-Consistency and Arc-Consistency Again presented at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-93), Washington, DC, USA
    Citation: For contributions to the foundations of constraint programming, providing an influential optimal propagation algorithm.
  • Honorable Mention Recipient: Ellen Riloff
    Automatically Constructing a Dictionary for Information Extraction Tasks presented at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-93), Washington, DC, USA
    Citation: For contributions to automated information extraction from text corpora leveraging natural language processing and structural analysis of news reports.

2011

  • Classic Paper Award Corecipients: Hector Levesque, David Mitchell, and Bart Selman
    for their two papers Hard and Easy Distribution of SAT Problems and A New Method for Solving Hard Satisfiability Problems presented at the Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-92), San Jose, California
    Citation: For their significant contributions to the area of automated reasoning via methods and analyses on satisfiability, providing foundational insights about constraint satisfaction and search.

2010

  • Classic Paper Award Corecipients: David McAllester and David Rosenblitt
    Systematic Nonlinear Planning presented at the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91), Anaheim, California
    Citation: For contributing seminal principles of systematic nonlinear planning, with wide-ranging influences on the evolution of research on automated planning.

2008

  • Classic Paper Award Corecipients: Steven Minton, Mark D. Johnston, Andrew B. Philips, and Philip Laird
    Solving Large-Scale Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling Problems Using a Heuristic Repair Method presented at the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), Boston, Massachusetts
    Citation: For a seminal contribution to stochastic local search for constraint satisfaction and its broad influence on local search algorithms and applications in artificial intelligence.
  • Honorable Mention Corecipients: Pattie Maes and Rodney A. Brooks
    Learning to Coordinate Behaviors presented at the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), Boston, Massachusetts
    Citation: For pioneering work on machine learning applied to the field of robotics, and on advancing the field of behavioral robotics.

2007

  • Classic Paper Award Corecipients: Peter Cheeseman, Matthew Self, Jim Kelly, Will Taylor, and Don Freeman
    Bayesian Classification presented at the Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-88), St. Paul, Minnesota
  • Honorable Mention Corecipients: Benjamin J. Kuipers and Yung-Tai Byun
    A Robust, Qualitative Method for Robot Spatial Learning presented at the Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-88), St. Paul, Minnesota

2006

2005

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2002

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1999