AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence that benefits humanity
Summary
Awarded annually since 2021, it has honoured the positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. Kidney exchanges allow swaps among donor-patient pairs, increasing the odds of finding compatible live donors. Sandholm is one of the pioneers in devising powerful computational methods to extract the full benefit of kidney exchanges, using cutting-edge AI and optimisation techniques to improve the scalability and flexibility of donor-patient matching. After this work was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, NEAD chains were adopted rapidly and broadly. By blending cutting-edge science and software with tireless efforts to see these methods put into practice, his impact on individual lives, families and society is inspiring," the AAAI said in the award announcement.