The AI & Robotics Research Awards aim to celebrate the extraordinary achievements of researchers, leaders and collaborators driving innovation in AI and Robotics. These awards will honour groundbreaking research, impactful industry partnerships, inspiring leadership, and meaningful contributions to the community.

The 2026 Awards Shortlist

Thank you to everyone who entered this year’s AI & Robotics Research Awards! We’re excited to unveiling the 2026 Awards Category Shortlist.

Community Award:

• Royal Academy of Engineering Team
• APRIL AI Hub

Best Research Paper:

• Efficient and Scalable Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Network Control – King’s College London
• Multi-label compound expression recognition: C-expr database & network – Queen Mary University of London
• CODI – Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation – King’s College London

Best Research Project for Impact:

• Centre for Emerging Technology and Security – Alan Turing Institute
• Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law Impact Assessment for AI Systems (HUDERIA) – Queen Mary University of London
• The Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing – IFOW 

Best Research Project (Research Excellence):

• Event-Centric Framework for Natural Language Understanding – King’s College London
• Conversational Robots to Support Well-being and Home Safety in Dementia Care – Imperial
• Improvement of Robotic-assisted Radical Prostatectomy (RARP) Functional and Oncological Outcomes via Automatically Segmented 3D Printed and VirtualProstate Models – King’s College London

Best Research Project (Industry Collaboration):

• Sustainable smArt Robotic Agriculture (SARA) – University of Essex
• MathOdyssey: Benchmarking Mathematical Problem-Solving Skills in Large Language Models Using Odyssey Math Data – University of Liverpool
• Project Bluebird – University of Exeter, NATS and The Alan Turing Institute

Leadership Award: This award will be announced at the Awards Ceremony on 18 March 2026

Our esteemed review panel

• Alessandra Russo
  Professor in Applied Computational Logic, Imperial College London

• David Lane
  Professor Emeritus, Heriot-Watt University
• Michael Wooldridge
  Ashall Professor of the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, University of Oxford
• Henry Tse
  Global Head of Products & Services, BAE Systems Digital Intelligence
• Andy Wright
  Professor in Practice, University of Glasgow
• Bashar Nuseibeh (Panel Chair)
  Professor of Computing, The Open University