The Lamarr Award – Honoring AI Achievements
With the Lamarr Award, the Lamarr Institute honors internationally recognized pioneers for their significant achievements in AI research and development. The distinguished award program particularly recognizes contributions which advance the Lamarr Institute’s vision of Triangular AI with its cornerstones data, knowledge and context. This triangularity also picks up on the three pillars of the Lamarr Institute, namely research, education and transfer, which are manifested in the composition of the Lamarr Award trophy.
The Lamarr Award 2026 – Dr. Jarek Kutylowski
At AI26 – The Lamarr Conference, we celebrated the second recipient of the Lamarr Award, Dr. Jarosław (Jarek) Kutyłowski, founder and CEO of DeepL, for his outstanding achievements in translating scientific excellence into internationally competitive AI innovations. The researcher and entrepreneur Jarek Kutylowski is a pioneer in building world-class AI technologies out of Europe, driving technological sovereignty and real-world impact through one of the globally leading machine translation services.
About our award winner: Dr. Jarek Kutylowski is the founder and CEO of DeepL, the Cologne-based AI product and research company building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Born in Poland and having spent a large part of his life in Germany, Jarek brings an international perspective and a lifelong passion for technology. A developer at heart, he began coding at just 10 years old, building tools he found useful in daily life. He holds a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on mathematics, and has held roles at several tech companies prior to founding DeepL.
Under his leadership, DeepL has grown rapidly, scaling its Language AI platform to offer highly accurate, human-like translation in both written and spoken formats alongside a contextual AI writing assistant. Today, over 200,000 business teams—and millions of individuals across 228 global markets—rely on DeepL for secure, seamless and effective communication.
Receiving the Lamarr Award is both an honor and a responsibility. It stands for the conviction that world-class research and real-world impact belong together — and that’s exactly the combination Europe needs to get right. We have the proof that Europe can build AI that global enterprises actively choose. The next chapter is about scaling that ambition, with the conviction that how we build matters as much as what we build.
Jarek Kutylowski
Impressions from the Award Ceremony
The Lamarr Award 2024 – Prof. Dr. Sebastian Thrun
At AI24 – The Lamarr Conference, we celebrated the first recipient of the Lamarr Award, Prof. Dr.-mult. Sebastian Thrun, for his outstanding contributions and achievements in advancing technology and education. The researcher and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun is a pioneer in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, robotics, human-computer interaction, medical devices, self-driving cars, and digital higher education.
About our award winner: Professor Thrun completed his PhD in computer science and statistics at the University of Bonn. In 1998, he was appointed to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. In 2003, he joined the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). In 2009, Sebastian Thrun established the Google X research division, contributing to groundbreaking projects such as Google Glass, the Google Brain machine learning project, and autonomous vehicles. He has also founded and sold several tech companies, including Udacity, an online learning platform valued at over $1 billion, with over thirty million users in more than 160 countries, and the air cab start-up Kitty Hawk. Google Scholar ranks Thrun’s publication h-index at number 15 worldwide in all of computer science. He has been named the fifth most creative person in business by Fast Company and Global Thinker #4 by Foreign Policy. He has received numerous accolades, including the Max Planck Research Award, and holds several honorary doctorates.
We already have massive AI innovations in the pipeline that will gradually help us all lead better lives. Germany should position itself as a global leader in this fundamental technology by fostering a new level of curiosity and openness across society.
Sebastian Thrun
Impressions from the Award Ceremony
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