Prof. James Hendler awarded the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize

Professor James Hendler has been awarded the prestigious 2025 AAAI Feigenbaum Award for his groundbreaking contributions to knowledge representation, planning, and the Semantic Web.  The award was presented to Professor Hendler during a ceremony at the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25) in Philadelphia, PA.

Prof. Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a current trustee and former chairman of the Web Science Trust.

Research

His research interests lie in the semantic web and artificial intelligence. For an extended period, he held a prestigious position as a professor at the University of Maryland, where he served as the Director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery. He also held joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and the Institute for Systems Research. Additionally, Hendler was the Director for Semantic Web and Agent Technology at the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the US National Academy of Public Administration and also a fellow of several prestigious organisations, including the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery.

“For much of my career my work has focused on scalable and decentralized systems and the World Wide Web. This prize helps confirm the importance of web science and the work we support through the Web Science Trust and our WSTNet lab partners,” he said.

The Feigenbaum Prize

The AAAI Feigenbaum Prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding Artificial Intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science. It is one of the highest honors in artificial intelligence, awarded  by the AAAI to recognize exceptional work that bridges AI theory and real-world application. As a premier award in the field, it celebrates researchers whose innovations have had a lasting impact on AI’s practical deployment, echoing the visionary contributions of Edward Feigenbaum. The distinguished list of past recipients—pioneers in expert systems, machine learning, and beyond—attests to the prize’s status as a benchmark of excellence, reserved for those who have profoundly shaped the field.

The “laboratories” for the experimental work are real-world domains, and the power of the research results are demonstrated in those domains. The Feigenbaum Prize may be given for a sustained record of high-impact seminal contributions to experimental AI research; or it may be given to reward singular remarkable innovation and achievement in experimental AI research. The prize is $10,000 and is provided by the Feigenbaum Nii Foundation and administered by AAAI.

Edward Feigenbaum is a Kumagai Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Stanford University. Feigenbaum earned his Ph.D at Carnegie Mellon University from 1956–1959. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a pioneer in AI research as experimental computer science, and in the applications of AI research. In 1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1995, he received computer science’s highest research honor — The ACM Turing Award. Feigenbaum was the second president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, serving from 1980–1981, and was elected to AAAI Fellowship in 1990.

The first Feigenbaum Prize was awarded in 2011 in conjunction with the Twenty-Fifth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11), held August 7–11, in San Francisco, California. The latest Feigenbaum Prize will be awarded at AAAI-25 in Philadelphia, PA.