Awards

Research

IJCAI-19 Computers and Thought Award, for contributions to statistical and relational artificial intelligence, and the study of tractability in learning and reasoning. The IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is considered to be "the premier award for artificial intelligence researchers under the age of 35".

NSF CAREER Award, for research towards a new synthesis of statistical learning and logical reasoning.

Sloan Research Fellowship, recognizes and rewards outstanding early-career faculty who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study.

Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, recognizing the exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research.

Research Council Award, KU Leuven, in recognition of promising and valuable research in science, engineering, and technology.

Conference Best Paper

IEEE Micro Top Picks 2022 Honorable Mention for the paper "Logical Abstractions for Noisy Variational Quantum Algorithm Simulation" , coauthored with Yipeng Huang, Steven Holtzen, Todd Millstein and Margaret R. Martonosi.

AAAI 2021 Distinguished Paper Award at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence for the paper "On the Tractability of SHAP Explanations" , coauthored with Anton Lykov, Maximilian Schleich and Dan Suciu.

OOPSLA 2020 Distinguished Paper Award at the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications. ACM SIGPLAN award for the paper "Scaling Exact Inference for Discrete Probabilistic Programs" , coauthored with Steven Holtzen, and Todd Millstein.

KR 2016 Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Marco Cadoli Student Paper Prize for the paper "Open-World Probabilistic Databases" , coauthored with Ismail Ilkan Ceylan, and Adnan Darwiche.

UAI 2015 Best Paper Award at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence for the paper "Hashing-Based Approximate Probabilistic Inference in Hybrid Domains" , coauthored with Vaishak Belle and Andrea Passerini.

AAAI 2014 Best Paper Honorable Mention at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence for the paper "Tractability through exchangeability: A new perspective on efficient probabilistic inference" , coauthored with Mathias Niepert.

ILP 2011 Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP 2011). Turing Theory Prize for the paper "k-optimal: A novel approximate inference algorithm for ProbLog" coauthored with Joris Renkens, and Siegfried Nijssen.

Workshop Best Paper

SPIGM 2025 Best Poster Award at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling for the paper "Zero-Variance Gradients for Variational Autoencoders" , coauthored with Zilei Shao and Anji Liu.

TPM 2021 Best Paper Award at the 4th Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Modeling for the paper "Probabilistic Generating Circuits" , coauthored with Honghua Zhang, and Brendan Juba.

StarAI 2020 Best Paper Award at the AAAI 2020 International Workshop on Statistical Relational AI for the paper "Symbolic Querying of Vector Spaces: Probabilistic Databases Meets Relational Embeddings" , coauthored with Tal Friedman.

LLD 2017 Best Paper Runner-Up at the NIPS 2017 Workshop on Learning with Limited Labeled Data: Weak Supervision and Beyond for the paper "A Semantic Loss Function for Deep Learning Under Weak Supervision" , coauthored with Jingyi Xu, Zilu Zhang, Tal Friedman, and Yitao Liang.

Thesis

EurAI Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award 2014, awarded annually for the best European dissertation in AI, by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Scientific prize IBM Belgium for Informatics, awarded annually for the best Flemish dissertation in computer science, by IBM Belgium and the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO Vlaanderen).

Nomination for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, by KU Leuven.

Alcatel-Lucent Innovation Award 2009, awarded for M.S. thesis, "Algorithms and Assessment in No-Limit Computer Poker".

Service

ICML 2016 Outstanding Reviewer Award at the International Conference on Machine Learning.