Benjamin Kuipers receives Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems

The Cognitive Systems Foundation has named Prof. Benjamin Kuipers as the 2024 recipient of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems, a top honor for researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and related fields. The award recognizes Kuipers’ lifetime contributions to the advancement of AI research, particularly on foundational domains of knowledge and ethics for robots and other AI agents.

The prize is named after Herbert A. Simon, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence in the 1950s, who developed and implemented some of the earliest computer models of human problem solving. In honor of Simon’s legacy, the Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems is awarded to senior researchers who “have made important and sustained contributions to understanding human and machine intelligence through the design, creation, and study of computational artifacts that exhibit high-level cognition.”

Kuipers was announced as the next recipient of  the Simon Prize at the 2024 Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, held in Palermo, Italy, on June 17-18. He will deliver the Simon Prize lecture at the 2025 Annual Conference.

Kuipers developed the first comprehensive computational models of cognitive maps, which served as the basis for his subsequent work on robot exploration and mapping. He created the QSIM  algorithm for qualitative simulation of dynamical systems, providing mathematically sound and efficient methods for better understanding a variety of physical systems. His contributions also include developmental  learning of objects, actions, and other foundational domains of commonsense knowledge.

In addition to his work on commonsense knowledge of the physical world, Kuipers is a leading voice on the topic of AI ethics. Through his teaching, speaking, and writing, he has spurred vital discussions on the role of trust in AI and robotics and its importance to AI’s successful integration into society.

Over a decades-long career at the University of Michigan, and before that at the University of Texas at Austin, Kuipers has solidified his status as a leading figure in the AI field, with a large body of influential publications and a record of rigorous, thought-provoking research. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).