Awards

Research Awards

• IJCAI-19 Computers and Thought Award, for contributions to statistical and relational artificial intelligence, and the study of tractability in learning and reasoning. The IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is considered to be "the premier award for artificial intelligence researchers under the age of 35".
• Research Council Award, KU Leuven, in recognition of promising and valuable research in science, engineering, and technology.

Best Paper Awards

• LLD 2017 Best Paper Runner-Up, at the NIPS 2017 Workshop on Learning with Limited Labeled Data: Weak Supervision and Beyond (LLD 2017). Awarded for the paper "A Semantic Loss Function for Deep Learning Under Weak Supervision" , coauthored with Jingyi Xu, Zilu Zhang, Tal Friedman, and Yitao Liang.
• KR 2016 Best Student Paper Award, Marco Cadoli Student Paper Prize, for the best student paper at the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2016). Awarded for the paper "Open-World Probabilistic Databases" , coauthored with Ismail Ilkan Ceylan and Adnan Darwiche.
• UAI 2015 Best Paper Award, for the best paper (out of 292) at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2015), funded by Microsoft. Awarded for the paper "Hashing-Based Approximate Probabilistic Inference in Hybrid Domains" , coauthored with Vaishak Belle and Andrea Passerini.
• AAAI 2014 Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, for the 5 best papers (out of 1406) at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2014). Awarded for the paper "Tractability through exchangeability: A new perspective on efficient probabilistic inference" , coauthored with Mathias Niepert.
• ILP 2011 Best Student Paper Award, Turing Theory Prize, for the best student paper at the International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP 2011), funded by Machine Learning Journal. Awarded for the paper "k-optimal: A novel approximate inference algorithm for ProbLog" coauthored with Joris Renkens and Siegfried Nijssen.

Thesis Awards

• ECCAI Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award 2014, awarded annually for the best European dissertation in AI, by ECCAI, the European Coordination Committee for Artificial Intelligence.
• Scientific prize IBM Belgium for Informatics, awarded annually for the best Flemish dissertation in computer science, by IBM Belgium and the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO Vlaanderen).
• Nomination for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, by KU Leuven.
• Alcatel-Lucent Innovation Award 2009, awarded for M.S. thesis, "Algorithms and Assessment in No-Limit Computer Poker".

Service Awards

• ICML 2016 Outstanding Reviewer Award, awarded for the 31 best program committee members at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2016).