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IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Opens in Bremen: Jiajun Wu Wins Computers and Thought Award, SMOTE Receives Inaugural Test of Time Award

At IJCAI-ECAI 2026 in Bremen, Stanford's Jiajun Wu won the Computers and Thought Award, and the SMOTE paper received the first JAIR Test of Time Award, amid 713 main-track papers.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-18 22:59

The award for Wu was announced by IJCAI President Kate Larson during the opening ceremony. The citation recognized his foundational contributions across computer vision, generative AI, and robotics, uniting neural and symbolic representations to build machines that understand and interact with the physical world. The Computers and Thought Award is considered a top honor for young AI researchers, with past recipients including Tom Mitchell, Rodney Brooks, Stuart Russell, Daphne Koller, and Andrew Ng. Recent Chinese-heritage winners include Fei Fang (2021), Bo Li (2022), and Pin-Yu Chen (2023).

The conference also presented several career awards. Nicholas R. Jennings of Imperial College received the Award for Research Excellence; David C. Parkes of Harvard won the John McCarthy Award; and Christian Bessiere was honored with the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award. Additionally, the AIJ Classic Paper Award went to Sarit Kraus, Daniel Lehmann, and Menachem Magidor for their 1990 paper "Nonmonotonic reasoning, preferential models and cumulative logics."

In the paper awards, the 2026 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize was given to Stephan Wäldchen, Jan MacDonald, Sascha Hauch, and Gitta Kutyniok for "The computational complexity of understanding binary classifier decisions." The newly established JAIR Test of Time Award went to Nitesh V. Chawla, Kevin W. Bowyer, Lawrence O. Hall, and W. Philip Kegelmeyer for their SMOTE paper, which introduced synthetic minority over-sampling to address class imbalance and has become one of the most widely used methods in machine learning.

Program committee chair Diego Calvanese reported that the conference received 6,342 submissions in total, of which 858 were accepted. In the main track, 713 papers were accepted out of 5,233 valid submissions, compared with 1,015 out of 5,348 in 2025, 791 out of 5,651 in 2024, and 643 out of 4,566 in 2023. Special tracks accepted: 25 for AI4Tech (out of 154), 47 for AI and Health (out of 236), 11 for AI and Robotics (out of 45), 52 for AI for Social Good (out of 176), and 10 for Human-Centred AI (out of 82). The Survey Track accepted 45 papers, the Journal Track 6, and the Sister Conference Track 17.

Calvanese also introduced the new Early Career Spotlight Talks, the first time the conference held an open call for nominations. Fourteen early-career researchers were selected to present their work during the meeting.

The opening ceremony featured welcomes from German research and space ministry official Alexandra-Gwyn Paetz and Bremen's mayor and Senate President Andreas Bovenschulte. Attendees also paid tribute to three scientists who passed away this year: Joe Halpern, Tony Hunter, and Lin Padgham. Following the awards, Nicholas R. Jennings delivered the first keynote lecture.