Professor Luc Steels wins the EURAI Distinguished Service Award 2022#
Professor Luc Steels, member of the Informatics section of Academia Europaea since 2009, is awarded the EURAI Distinguished Service Award 2022, "for his pioneering and groundbreaking work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, as well as for his foundational contributions to the AI organization in the European Union".
The EURAI Distinguished Service Award
is the highest award in Europe for Artificial Intelligence research presented every two years to an individual who has made exceptional contributions to the AI community in Europe.
Prof. Dr. Luc Steels is a Belgian researcher and artist. His work is marked by a trans-disciplinary approach with a focus on forging conceptual breakthroughs in AI, building the technical tools to work out and develop these breakthroughs, and developing concrete experiments to turn the breakthroughs into viable new AI paradigms.
Since the nineteen-eighties, Luc Steels, professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB) since 1983, has played a big role in the organization of the European AI landscape. In 1981, he was the founding chairman of the Belgian AI association, which merged later with the Dutch AI association to form BNAIC. He was involved in setting up ECCAI (today EurAI) and was the founding editor (with Prof. Bob Wielinga) of AI Communications, the largest European AI journal. He founded the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris in 1996 and became its first director. Currently he is ICREA research professor at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (CSIC, UPF).
