Karl has won numerous awards at Cannes, Webby, One Show, New York Festivals, Asia Pacific Adfest, Abby and AAAI, including the 1st Indian Cyber Shortlist at Cannes 2006 for Timesjobs, the 1st Indian Webby award for a simple and intuitive multilingual portal for Life Insurance Corporation of India, the 1st Bronze Cyber Lion at Cannes 2008 and India’s first Silver Pencil at the One Show Interactive 2009 for an Online campaign “highlighting what's important” for Luxor Highlighters.
She has six best paper awards, an NSF Career Award, and is an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow.
In the middle 1990s, while serving as president of AAAI, Hayes began a series of attacks on critics of AI, mostly phrased in an ironic light, and (together with his colleague Kenneth Ford) invented an award named after Simon Newcomb to be given for the most ridiculous argument "disproving" the possibility of AI.
KDD Conferences grew from KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) workshops at AAAI conferences, which were started by Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro in 1989, 1991, and 1993, and Usama Fayyad in 1994.