The ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to Margaret A. Boden for contributions to the philosophy and historiography of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, particularly in the study of human creativity.
For four decades, Boden has been one of the world’s premiere thought leaders on the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and the humanities. Through insightful analyses, she was often the first to reveal surprising connections among disciplines, which she then outlined in a series of highly influential books. In two classic books-Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man (1977) and The Creative Mind (1990)-she introduced the idea of creative cognition, which inspired a generation of researchers and laid the foundation of computational creativity as a new subfield of artificial intelligence.
Boden’s two-volume Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (2006) is a comprehensive survey of interdisciplinary work at the intersection of cognitive science and computation that
highlights work in neuroscience, philosophy, biology, psychology linguistics and computation. Her most recent book AI, Its Nature and Future (2016) was described by Nature magazine as “a
masterclass.”
The award is named for Allen Newell (1927-1992), a trailblazer in computer science research and education, and a founder of the artificial intelligence and cognitive science fields. A pivotal
force in creating Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, he co- authored Human problem Solving with Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon in 1972. Both were recipients of ACM’s 1975 A.M. Turing
Award.
The Newell Award is presented to individuals selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. It is accompanied by a $10,000 prize provided by ACM and the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and by individual contributions.