• International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Silver Core Award, 2007.
• Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw ( Dutch Knighthood ), 2007.
• Adjunct Professor Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2005.
• Appointed ``Hoogleraar 1'' (highest professor rank) at the University of Amsterdam, 2005.
• Kolmogorov Medal---given to invited speakers at the "Kolmogorov and Contemporary Mathematics" Centennial Congress in Moscow, 16--21 June, 2003.
• Appointed CWI Fellow, 2003.
• Medal of the University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, 2003.
• People Republic of China's 1999 National 1st Prize for Excellent Books in Science and Technology published in the Peoples Republic of China. Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi, ``Description Complexity and Applications,'' China Science Press, Beijing, December 1998 (Chinese translation by Cheng Qi)
• Some conference contributed papers selected for special journal issues (but generally published in other journals) among others at STOC 1982, PODC 1985, ICALP 1989 (two papers), ICALP 1999, SIROCCO 2002, COCOON 2002, ISAAC 2002.
• Some distinguished lectures, keynote lectures, invited lectures, tutorials:
  • Plenary talk: 2009 Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering, August 17 - 19, 2009, Tampere, Finland.
  • Invited talk: 4th International Conference on Logic, Computability and Randomnes, June 29 -July 3rd, 2009, CIRM Luminy, Marseille, France.
  • Invited Plenary Speaker: International Conference "Theory and Applications of Models of Computation 2006", 15th - 20th May, 2006, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
  • Invited Keynote Plenary Speaker: The 4th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2005) 31st July - 3rd August , 2005 , Hong Kong SAR, China.
  • Invited Plenary Speaker, Information Beyond Shannon, Orlando, Oct. 27-28, 2005.
  • Invited Plenary Speaker at the 26th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium, on may 19-20, 2005.
  • Invited Speaker at the 2005 ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, and 1st Workshop on Reversible Computing, Ischia, Italy, 4-6 May 2005.
  • Invited Speaker Special Session Complexity of Computation and Algorithms at the Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Santa Barbara, California, in April, 2005. (refused)
  • Invited Speaker ITW2005 - IEEE ITSOC Information Theory Workshop 2005 on Coding and Complexity 29th Aug. - 1st Sept, Rotorua, New Zealand.
  • Lecture Course: Introduction to Kolmogorov complexity and applications, National ICT of Australia, Sydney Laboratory at UNSW, Sydney, Australia, Hosted by: KRR and SMLKA Programs; Fall Semester 2004.
  • Panel member of 13th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, October 11-13, 2004 Chicago, IL USA (refused)
  • Invited Speaker at the Workshop on Model Selection, Amsterdam, Netherlands, August 27-29, 2004.
  • Invited Speaker at the UE-NoE PASCAL Workshop "Learning Theoretic and Bayesian Inductive Principles Workshop" in London, UK, July 19-21, 2004.
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker at the Conference on Logic, Computability and Randomness 2004, Cordoba, Argentina, 20--24 September 2004;
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker at the Association for Symbolic Logic 2004 Annual Meeting, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburg, USA, 19--23 May 2004;
  • Distinguished Lecture Series 2004, Computer Science Department, University of Helsinki, Finland;
  • Keynote speaker at the "Kolmogorov and Contemporary Mathematics" Centennial Congress at Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, 16--21 June, 2003;
  • Invited plenary speaker EURANDOM Workshop 2003;
  • Distinguished Lecture Series, CS Dept, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA, 2002;
  • Intn'l Workshop ``Aspects of Complexity and its Applications'' Rome, 2002;
  • Opening Keynote Lecture ``6th Intn'l Coll. Grammatical Inference (ICGI-2002), Amsterdam, 2002;
  • NIPS Workshops, Whistler, BC, Canada, 2002;
  • Workshop Algorithmic Information Theory (TAI 2001) Pourquerolles, France, 2001;
  • NIPS Workshops (two lectures), Whistler, BC, Canada, 2001;
  • Workshop Algorithmic Information Theory (TAI 2000), Lille, France;
  • Keynote speaker at the ``Perspectives of Computer Science'', International Conference and Research Center in Computer Science in Schloss Dagstuhl 10th anniversary;
  • Invited speaker at the ``Model Selection and Learning in Computer Vision'' Rank Prize Symposium, UK, 2000; ``Workshop on Complexity, Computation and the Physics of Information'', Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK, 1999;
  • Workshop on Algorithmic Information Theory (TAI 99),'' Nancy, France, 1999;
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker Third Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON'97), Shanghai, China;
  • 9th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'97),
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker (IEEE) Conference on "Compression and Complexity of Sequences", Positano, Italy, 1997;
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker 7th Intn'l Workshop on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT'96), Sydney, Australia, 1996;
  • Tutorial speaker Conf. Information, Statistics and Induction in Science (ISIS), Melbourne, Australia, 1996;
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker 4th bi-annual Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures, WADS'95, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 1995;
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker 20th Intn'l Symp. Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, 1995, Prague, Czech Republic;
  • Keynote Plenary Speaker 4th Intn'l Workshop Inductive Logic Programming, Bad Honnef, Germany, 1994; PhD Summer School in Data Complexity and Applications to Image Processing, 1994, Copenhagen, Denmark;
  • Tutorial speaker Machine Learning Confi (ML'94), and Computational Machine Learning (COLT'94) Conference, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, 1994;