Submission Deadline: October 1, 2024

EAAI, in cooperation with AAAI, is soliciting nominations for the Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator award, an award that is presented annually to 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 free conference registration to the upcoming EAAI conference and co-located AAAI conference where the award will be conferred.

A nomination package should include the following material:

• the CV of the nominee,
• a nomination letter (maximum three pages),
• two additional letters of endorsement (maximum three pages), and
• optionally, two additional pages of supporting documentation.

All letter writers should be members of the AI community, ideally from different institutions and relatively independent of the nominee. The nomination letter should describe the specific educational achievements of the nominee that merit the AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator award, describe their impact, and provide a proposed award citation of 30 words or fewer. Self-nominations are not accepted. The letters of endorsement should provide first-hand knowledge of the letter writers that support the statements in the nomination, not merely repeat them.

The nominator should compile the nomination package and submit the complete package by October 1, 2024 to eaaiaward@aaai.org. Nomination packages that arrive after the deadline will not be considered. The award committee will acknowledge receipt of the nominations but will not contact the nominees (to keep the nominations confidential). The award will be conferred at the upcoming EAAI conference, which the award winner is expected to attend. The winner is also expected to make a presentation at the conference. Nominations are expected to be for an individual educator, but pairs and trios have been nominated in the past when their contributions are highly intertwined.

Nominators will be informed of the result of the decision for any nominations they made. A nominator will have the choice of withdrawing an unsuccessful nomination to wait for a more appropriate time, updating the nomination for the following year to strengthen the case, or leaving the nomination unchanged for consideration for the next year. Unsuccessful nominations that are not explicitly withdrawn by the nominator will be automatically reconsidered for up to two additional years and then withdrawn.

In case of questions, please contact the chair of the award committee, Michael Littman (eaaiaward@aaai.org).