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.

This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. (February 2020)

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]

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

• List of computer science awards
• Turing Award