AAAI and ACM SIGAI established the Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award to recognize and encourage superior research and writing by doctoral candidates in artificial intelligence. The award is presented annually at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and the winner is invited to present a talk at the conference.
2025 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award Winner
The award is shared by Akari Asai, University of Washington and Noah Golowich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Akari Asai University of Washington for the dissertation titled Beyond Scaling: Frontiers of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models.
Noah Golowich Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the dissertation titled Theoretical Foundations for Learning in Games and Dynamic Environments.
2025 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
Sarah Alyami King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Thom Badings Radboud University, and Brian Hu Zhang Carnegie Mellon University
Sarah Alyami King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals for the dissertation titled Continuous Sign Language Recognition: Dataset Development and Novel Frameworks.
Thom Badings Radboud University for the dissertation titled Robust Verification of Stochastic Systems: Guarantees in the Presence of Uncertainty.
Brian Hu Zhang Carnegie Mellon University for the dissertation titled New Solution Concepts and Algorithms for Equilibrium Computation and Learning in Extensive-Form Games and Beyond.
Past Recipients
2024 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award Winner
Shunyu Yao Princeton University for his work entitled Language Agents: From Next-Token Prediction to Digital Automation.
2024 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
Frederik Kunstner University of British Columbia and Sewon Min University of Washington
Frederik Kunstner for his work entitled Why Do Machine Learning Optimizers That Work, Work?
Sewon Min for her work entitled Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models.
2023 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award Winner
The award is shared by Gabriele Farina, Carnegie Mellon University and Jonathan Frankle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gabriele Farina for his work entitled Game-Theoretic Decision Making in Imperfect-Information Games.
Jonathan Frankle for his work entitled The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: On Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks.
2023 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Technische Universität Berlin for her work entitled Models and Algorithms for Scalable Collective Decision Making
2022 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award Winner
The award is shared by Alane Suhr, Cornell University and Erik Wijmans, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Alane Suhr for her work entitled Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems.
Erik Wijmans for his work entitled Emergence of Intelligent Navigation Behavior in Embodied Agents from Massive-Scale Simulation.
2021 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award Winner
Shibani Santurkar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology for her work entitled Machine Learning Beyond Accuracy: A Features Perspective On Model Generalization
2021 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
Bryan Wilder, Harvard University for his work entitled AI for Population Health: Melding Data and Algorithms on Networks
2020 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award Winner
Noam Brown, Carnegie Mellon University for his work entitled Equilibrium Finding for Large Adversarial Imperfect-Information Games
2020 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
David Abel, Brown University for his work entitled A Theory of Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning
2020 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
Abhishek Das, Georgia Institute of Technology for his work entitled Building Agents that Can See, Talk, and Act
2019 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award Winner
Jiajun Wu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA for his work entitled Learning to See the Physical World
2019 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
Aishwarya Agrawal, Georgia Institute of Technology for her work entitled Visual Question Answering and Beyond
2019 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Honorable Mention
Li Dong, University of Edinburgh, for his work entitled Learning Natural Language Interfaces with Neural Models