Texas ECE associate professor Atlas Wang has been named the winner of the 2026 J.K. Aggarwal Prize from the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) for "contributions to the efficient training and deployment of generative models
with applications to language and vision."

IAPR is an association of non-profit, scientific, and professional organizations concerned with pattern recognition, computer vision, and image processing in a broad sense.

The J. K. Aggarwal Prize is given to a young scientist who has brought a substantial contribution to a field that is relevant to the IAPR community and whose research work has had a major impact on the field. Aggarwal is a Professor Emeritus in Texas ECE widely recognized for his extensive contributions to the field of pattern recognition and for his participation in IAPR’s activities.
The 2026 prize will be presented at the 28th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2026) in Lyon, France on August 17-22, 2026.

Prof. Wang has received many research awards, including an NSF CAREER Award, an ARO Young Investigator Award, an IEEE AI's 10 To Watch Award, an AI 100 Top Thought Leader Award, an INNS Aharon Katzir Young Investigator Award, a Google Research Scholar award, an IBM Faculty Research Award, a J. P. Morgan Faculty Research Award, an Amazon Research Award, a Sony Faculty Research Award, an Adobe Data Science Research Award, a Meta Reality Labs Research Award, and two Google TensorFlow Model Garden Awards.