The Herbert A. Simon Prize recognizes scientists who have made important and sustained contributions to understanding human and machine intelligence through the design, creation, and study of computational artifacts that exhibit high-level cognition.

The Cognitive Systems Foundation and the Herbert Simon Society co-sponsor the Prize, which comes with a cash award of $10,000. Last year, after considering some excellent candidates, the selection committee decided that:

"The recipient of the 2019 Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances
in Cognitive Systems is Patrick Henry Winston, for his seminal
research on concept learning, analogy, common-sense reasoning,
and story processing, which he saw as key to understanding
intelligence, and for his textbooks, courses, and videos, which
educated generations of students in artificial intelligence."

Because Patrick Winston cannot present his prize address, we have organized a symposium in his honor, with four talks by researchers he mentored during his career, at the Eighth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (http://www.cogsys.org/conference/2020/), where we will also announce the winner of the 2020 Simon Prize. 

The virtual three-day conference, hosted by PARC, will take place next week from Monday, August 10, to Wednesday, August 12. Registration is free at https://advancesincognitivesystems.github.io/acs/, which also links to the meeting schedule. The Winston symposium will be on Tuesday from 12:45 pm to 2:30 pm Pacific time. I hope many of you can attend.

Sincerely,

Pat Langley, Director
Cognitive Systems Foundation