TLDR: Aditya Grover, an assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been honored with the prestigious Computers and Thought Award. This accolade recognizes his groundbreaking work in integrating deep generative models, representation learning, and reinforcement learning, and their significant applications in advancing scientific reasoning.
Aditya Grover, a distinguished assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been named the recipient of the 2025 Computers and Thought Award. This esteemed international award, presented by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), celebrates early career researchers who have made exceptional contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.
Grover is specifically recognized for his ‘foundational contributions uniting deep generative models, representation learning, and reinforcement learning, and for their applications in advancing scientific reasoning.’ His innovative research has significantly pushed the boundaries of AI, particularly in developing systems that can interact and reason with limited supervision.
As the 2025 awardee, Professor Grover is slated to present his research at the IJCAI’s upcoming August meeting in Montreal, Canada. At UCLA, he leads the Machine Intelligence (MINT) group, where his work primarily focuses on the critical intersection of generative models and sequential decision-making processes.
Beyond his academic pursuits, Grover is also a co-founder of Inception, a generative AI-innovation company. Through Inception, he is actively involved in developing a new generation of parallelizable large language models and solutions designed for optimal quality, speed, and cost efficiency. His commitment to the broader impact of AI extends to investigating sustainability in computer science, notably through his involvement in the ML4Climate initiative.
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This latest recognition adds to an impressive list of accolades for Professor Grover. In 2024, he received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, accompanied by a five-year, $500,000 grant to further his research in generative AI models. He was also named a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow, a fellowship providing up to $300,000 over two years for interdisciplinary AI research aimed at aligning AI systems with human values by 2050. His achievements also include being recognized in Forbes’ 2024 ’30 Under 30′ list in science and being named a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2023. Since joining the UCLA Samueli faculty in 2021, he has additionally received an Amazon Research Award, an AI Researcher of the Year Award from Samsung, a Google Award for Inclusion Research, and a Meta Research Award. Notably, Grover follows in the footsteps of fellow UCLA Samueli computer science professor Guy Van den Broeck, who received the same Computers and Thought Award in 2019.
