Moshe Y. Vardi, University Professor at Rice University, has been named a 2026 NAAI Academy Award laureate by the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI). The award is the Academy’s highest honor and recognizes scientists whose research has fundamentally advanced the scientific foundations of artificial intelligence.
Vardi received the award for seminal contributions to logic-based artificial intelligence and formal reasoning in intelligent systems. His work has significantly advanced the logical foundations that underpin modern AI research, particularly in areas such as formal reasoning, verification and logic in computer science.
The 2026 NAAI Academy Award recognizes three international leaders whose work has shaped key theoretical pillars of modern artificial intelligence.
Along with Vardi, the 2026 laureates include:
- Judea Pearl of University of California, Los Angeles, honored for establishing the foundations of causal reasoning and causal artificial intelligence. Pearl’s work on structural causal models and probabilistic reasoning has transformed how intelligent systems represent and reason about cause and effect.
- Yurii Nesterov of Université catholique de Louvain, recognized for foundational contributions to convex optimization theory and its profound impact on modern machine learning. His research in optimization has played a central role in the development of machine learning algorithms and large-scale data-driven computation.
The NAAI Academy Award honors researchers whose work has reshaped the intellectual foundations of artificial intelligence and continues to influence the evolution of the field worldwide.
The 2026 award laureates will be formally recognized at the 2026 NAAI Annual Conference, which will take place in Singapore from May 3–5, 2026.
About Moshe Vardi
At Rice, Vardi is University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. His research focuses on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite-model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems and computer-aided verification and reasoning.
Vardi earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981. After research positions at IBM Research and work at Stanford University, he joined the Rice faculty in 1993.
He has authored or co-authored more than 800 scientific papers and serves as senior editor of Communications of the ACM, the flagship publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, after previously serving as its editor-in-chief for a decade.
Among his honors are membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea and the Royal Society of London. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematical Society.