The Computers and Thought Award is presented at IJCAI conferences to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. The award was established with royalties received from the book, Computers and Thought, edited by Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman; it is currently supported by income from IJCAI funds. Past recipients of this honor have been: Terry Winograd (1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas Lenat (1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981), Tom Mitchell (1983), Hector Levesque (1985), Johan de Kleer (1987), Henry Kautz (1989), Rodney Brooks (1991), Martha Pollack (1991), Hiroaki Kitano (1993), Sarit Kraus (1995), Stuart Russell (1995), Leslie Kaelbling (1997), Nicholas Jennings (1999), Daphne Koller (2001), Tuomas Sandholm (2003), and Peter Stone (2007).

There are two winners of the 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award: Carlos Guestrin, Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning Department and the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and Andrew Ng, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of Stanford University. Professor Guestrin is recognized for significant contributions to machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, and intelligent distributed sensor networks. Professor Ng is recognized for fundamental contributions to the application of machine learning to robot perception and control, for leadership in constructing robots that perform unscripted tasks in real environments, and for major contributions to machine learning.