Each year, CAIAC awards a Best Dissertation Award and a Best Master's thesis award.

Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award

• 2017: John Doucette, University of Waterloo
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Robin Cohen
• 2016: Tyler Lu, University of Toronto
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Craig Boutilier
• 2015: Yaoliang Yu, University of Alberta
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Dale Schuurmans and Csaba Szepesvári
• 2014: Hootan Nakhost, University of Alberta
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Martin Mueller
• 2013: Gabor Bartok, University of Alberta
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Csaba Szepesvári
• 2012: Albert Xin Jiang, University of British Columbia
  Thesis Information
  Supervised by Kevin Leyton-Brown
• 2011: Martin de Lasa, University of Toronto
  Thesis Information
  Supervised by Aaron Hertzmann
• 2010: Frank Hutter, University of British Columbia
  Thesis Information
  Supervised by Holger Hoos (principal supervisor), Kevin Leyton-Brown, and Kevin Murphy.

Master's Thesis Award

• 2019: Richard Moulton, University of Ottawa
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Nathalie Japkowicz and Herna Viktor
• 2017: Yifan Wu, University of Alberta
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Csaba Szepesvári and András György

• 2016: Kurt Routley, Simon Fraser University
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Oliver Schulte
• 2015: William Leif Hamilton, McGill University
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Joelle Pineau
• 2014: Eric Thibodeau-Laufer, University of Montreal
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Yoshua Bengio
• 2013: Hang Shao, University of Ottawa
  Thesis information
  Supervised by Nathalie Japkowicz

• 2012: Martin Lesmana, University of British Columbia
  Thesis Information
  Supervised by Dinesh Pai