Drs. Alan Mackworth and David Poole recognized for making AI education accessible to students worldwide

Professors Emeriti Alan Mackworth and David Poole were awarded the AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award for developing free online resources to learn foundations of artificial intelligence 

UBC Computer Science Professors Emeriti Alan Mackworth and David Poole were awarded the AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award at the 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference, which took place January 20-27, 2026 in Singapore.  

The award recognizes educators who have made major contributions to AI education that benefits the AI community and society. Dr. Mackworth and Dr. Poole were recognized for their work in creating high-quality AI educational resources for students worldwide, including a freely available textbook, open source Python code and web-based teaching tools. 

At the conference, Dr. Poole gave their joint talk, The Essence of Intelligence is Appropriate Action (not thinking, reasoning, learning or language) and other things every student of AI should know. 

“We are delighted and honoured to receive this award in the name of Patrick Henry Winston, who wrote one of the first AI textbooks and was known as a great teacher,” says Dr. Mackworth.

For over 30 years, Dr. Mackworth and Dr. Poole have been developing educational resources for AI education, with the first edition of their textbook published in 1998. They wanted the textbook and online resources to be accessible to everyone, so they made them readily available online, free of cost. 

“It’s critical for students who can’t afford a textbook to get access to basic ideas, to be able to work in the field and to have a successful career,” says Dr. Poole. 

With the rapid growth in the AI field, Dr. Mackworth and Dr. Poole reorganized and enhanced the content for more popular topics such as neural networks and generative AI.  

“We are not trying to teach the very latest wrinkles in AI, because textbooks can’t keep up with the fast pace of the field,” says Dr. Mackworth. “We teach the principles and foundations of AI that underlie algorithms so that students can understand the basics of how modern AI algorithms work.” 

The textbook includes open-source, runnable pseudocode for the algorithms in the book, which allows students to experiment with the code and visualize the algorithms. With over 100,000 active users across 193 countries accessing the book’s website in the last year, the textbook and learning resources are used across the globe, including in many university classrooms.  

The third and latest edition of the textbook, published in 2023, covers the major current topics but also integrates discussions about the social, ethical and regulatory impacts of AI in each chapter, such as the use of deep learning in facial recognition technology. 

“One of our goals when writing this textbook was to have people from many different countries use it and learn from it — so it’s very gratifying to see that happening,” says Dr. Poole.