Guy Van den Broeck, an assistant professor of computer science in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received the 2019 Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The award is considered the highest award in the AI field for researchers under the age of 35.
Van den Broeck leads the Statistical and Relational Artificial Intelligence Lab. His research interests are in machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, applications of probabilistic reasoning and learning, and AI in general.
Currently, he’s developing programming languages and algorithms that allow AI systems to perform high-level reasoning and solve complex cognitive tasks. He’s also helping to make machine learning techniques broadly available and easier to use. Van den Broeck, who is a Samueli fellow, joined the UCLA faculty in 2015.
The Computers and Thought Award debuted in 1973. Previous winners include Martha Pollack, Cornell University’s president; and Hiroaki Kitano, president and CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories. The award was presented in August at the IJCAI 2019 conference in Macau, where he also gave a talk on his work.
