AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award
The annual AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award was created in 2016 to honor a person (or group of people) who has made major contributions to AI education that provide long-lasting benefits to the AI community. Examples include innovating teaching methods, providing service to the AI education community, generating pedagogical resources, designing curricula, and educating students outside of higher education venues (or the general public) about AI. The award consists of a certificate, a $1,000 honorarium, complimentary one-year AAAI membership (new or renewal), and a complimentary conference registration to the upcoming EAAI/AAAI conferences, where the award will be conferred.
Past Recipients
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2022: David Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Christina Gardner-McCune (University of Florida, USA), Fred Martin (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA), and Debora Seehorn
For the creation, curation, and dissemination of guidelines and resources for teaching Artificial Intelligence to K-12 students.
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2021: Michael Wooldridge (University of Oxford and Alan Turing Institute, London)
For outstanding global leadership in AI education and public awareness, including publishing broadly adopted books and textbooks, establishing the European Agent Systems Summer School, and inspiring public dialogue on AI and multi-agent systems.
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2020: Marie desJardins (Simmons University, USA)
For leading the AI community in cultivating and recognizing advances in AI education, sharing pedagogical advances, increasing diversity, and improving K-12 CS teacher preparation.
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2019: Ashok Goel (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
For sustained excellence in teaching, innovation in using AI to teach AI, scientific experimentation and scholarship to assess and improve AI pedagogy, and the many resources he has shared with the community at large.
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2018: Todd W. Neller (Gettysburg College, USA)
For his longstanding dedication and service to the AI education community at large, for curating shared resources, and for advancing and energizing the field of AI education.
- 2017: Sebastian Thrun (Udacity, KittyHawk, Stanford University, Georgia Tech)
For his pioneering efforts on the creation of high-quality, widely available, and affordable online courses, including seminal artificial intelligence courses, and for demonstrating the excitement of AI research in self-driving cars and navigation.
- 2016: Peter Norvig (Google, Inc.) and Stuart Russell (University of California, Berkeley)
Honored specifically for their definitive textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, that systematized the field of artificial intelligence and inspired a new generation of scientists and engineers throughout the world, as well as for their individual contributions to education in artificial intelligence.