Kampé de Fériet Award

The late Professor Joseph Kampé de Fériet was a famous scientist in France. His works range from pure mathematics, fluide mechanics, theory of turbulence, statistical mechanics to information theory. He was a professor at the University of Science and Technology of Lille and a correspondant of the French Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the Spanish Academy of Sciences. His latest work was centered around the theory of semantic information with, perhaps, a vision for applications to humanistic systems. He died in the 80s. To pay homage to his memory, we have decided to create a Kampé de Fériet Award, for the recognition of significant works in this spirit, which bring an exceptional contribution to the field of information processing and management of uncertainty. It is given on the occasion of each IPMU Conference.

Previous winners

  • The first recipient was Professor Lotfi A. ZADEH in 1992 at Palma de Mallorca, for his introduction of fuzzy set and possibility theories and his pioneering work on the theory of approximate reasoning.
  • In 1994, Professor Ilya PRIGOGINE (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1977) received the award for his contributions to the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium. Professor Prigogine was the Director of the International Intitutes of Physics and Chemistry Solvay in Brussels, and of the Center of Statistical Mechanics of the University of Texas at Austin.
  • In 1996, the award was presented to Professor Toshiro TERANO, from Tokyo Institute of Technology, for his seminal work on fuzzy control and his role in the emergence of research on intelligent systems.
  • In 1998, Professor Kenneth ARROW (Nobel Prize in Economic Science, 1972) received the award for his fundamental work on social choice and collective welfare. Professor Arrow is Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus and Professor of Operations Research Emeritus at Stanford University.
  • In 2000, the recipient was Professor Richard JEFFREY, from Princeton University, for his contributions to the basic foundations in probability.
  • In 2002, the recipient of the Kampe de Feriet Award was Professor Arthur DEMPSTER, of Harvard University. Professor Dempster is being recognized for his life long contributions to the field of mathematical statistics as well as his pioneering work which led to the development of the field which has become known as the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions.
  • In 2004, the award was presented to Professor Janos ACZEL, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the University of Waterloo (Canada), for his pioneering work on the theory of functional equations, with applications in many fields, such as information measures, index numbers, group decision making, aggregation, production functions, laws of science, theory of measurement and utility theory.
  • In 2006, Professor Daniel KAHNEMAN (Nobel Prize in Economic Science, 2002) from Princeton University has received the award for his life long contribution to decision making under uncertainty, prospect theory and the understanding of human judgment in uncertain environments.
  • In 2008, the award was presented to Professor Enric TRILLAS (Emeritus researcher, European Centre for Soft Computing) for his contribution to multivalued logics and its underlying role in fuzzy logic. The award also acknowledges his outstanding leadership and contribution to the uncertainty community.
  • In 2010, the award was presented to Professor James BEZDEK (Florida, USA), in view of his eminent research contributions to the handling of uncertainty in clustering, data analysis and pattern recognition.
  • In 2012, Professor Michio SUGENO (Emeritus Researcher, European Centre for Soft Computing) received the award for fundamental contributions in fuzzy systems modeling and control and the theory of information aggregation.
  • In 2014, Professor Vladimir Naumovich VAPNIK (NEC Laboratories in Princeton, USA; Royal Holloway, University of London, UK and Columbia University, USA) has been selected for the Kampé de Fériet Award for his pioneering work on Statistical Learning Theory and his development of the theory of the Support Vector Machine algorithm.
  • In 2016, the award was presented to Professor Joseph Y. HALPERN (Cornell University, USA) for his contributions to decision theory and reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty.
  • In 2018, Professor Glenn SHAFER (Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick) received the Kampé de Fériet award for seminal contributions to the mathematical theory of evidence and belief functions as well influential contributions to the field of reasoning under uncertainty
  • In 2020, Barbara TVERSKY, Emerita Professor of Psychology at Stanford and Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College, received the Kampé de Fériet award for her contributions to cognitive psychology, and in particular her work on memory, thought, spatial mental models and event perception
  • In 2022, Tomaso POGGIO (Eugene McDermott Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and Director of the NSF Center for Brains, Minds and Machines at MIT) received the Kampé de Fériet award for his interdisciplinary achievements on human and machine intelligence and his fundamental research in computational neuroscience, in particular concerning the computational analysis of vision and learning.

Special Award

Fifty years of Artificial Intelligence

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Artificial Intelligence, Jacques PITRAT (CNRS, Paris, France) received the IPMU special award “Fifty years of Artificial Intelligence” in 2006 for his seminal work on artificial intelligence, started in 1960 and his ongoing influential research and teaching.