On May 4, 2026, Bernard De Baets received the 2026 Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award from the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI) for “his foundational contributions to fuzzy preference modeling, ordinal data analysis, and uncertainty-aware intelligent decision systems”. The award ceremony took place at the NAAI 2026 Annual Academic Conference in Singapore. The award was conferred by Anthony Cohn, recipient of the award in 2025, and former Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier's flagship journal Artificial Intelligence.

The award places Bernard among a select group of sixteen international laureates, alongside two Turing Prize winners, Judea Pearl (UCLA), a pioneer of causal inference, and Leslie Valiant (Harvard), who helped define the theoretical foundations of machine learning, as well as Karl Friston (UCL), known for the Free Energy Principle, and Marco Dorigo (ULB), inventor of ant colony optimization. The award recognizes researchers who have opened new directions in the scientific foundations of AI.

Bernard's research addresses a central question in modern AI: how to make responsible decisions when information is incomplete, imprecise or expressed on ordinal scales, conditions that are the rule rather than the exception in the applied biological sciences.