University of Washington professor and IFDS affiliate faculty Jerry Li was awarded the 2026 Gödel Prize with his collaborators at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2026) last month.

The AISTATS Test of Time Award recognizes a paper, published at the conference roughly a decade earlier, whose ideas have had unusually durable impact on the field.

IFDS director Maryam Fazel received the 2025 Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society. The Farkas Prize is an annual award honoring a mid-career researcher for outstanding, career-spanning contributions to the field of optimization. Fazel was recognized for her foundational work in optimization and pioneering contributions to data science and artificial intelligence." INFORMS citation

The Institute for Foundations of Data Science (IFDS) brought AI and machine learning experts from across the nation to the University of Washington to discuss and explore the mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic underpinnings of modern AI systems. The IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI was held in August 2025 at the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering on the UW campus.