Share Why we disrupted Annalena Baerbock's award speech on social media When, in late August, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation announced that former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was its 2026 medallist, we were stunned. The cognitive dissonance was striking, even if we had become used to this after years of unabashed hypocrisy within the world's most powerful institutions. According to the foundation's homepage, the medal is given to a person who "contributes to a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable world through valuable achievements in politics or research". As this year's medallist, Baerbock was invited to visit Uppsala University and deliver a lecture. Here was an event claiming to celebrate " compassion, humanism and commitment to international solidarity " while honouring the foreign minister of a government that approved 94 million euros ($102m) in arms exports to Israel in the span of three months in 2024.

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we chat to AI pioneer, Michael Littman, learn about time-series forecasting for clinical data, investigate evolutionary game theory for cybersecurity, and get the scoop on neuromorphic computing. In the latest interview in our series meeting AI pioneers, Michael Littman reflects on the evolution of reinforcement learning, the power of science communication, and how generative AI is changing the way we teach and learn. Mayra Elwes is a PhD student developing machine learning methods for clinical time-series data. She is working on practical strategies to evaluate methods in a more contextualised way and on improving existing domain adaptation methods specific to time-series forecasting.

An AI Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research'Irrelevant' Anthropic and OpenAI say they've disproved a key tenet of computer science. Researchers are struggling with the fall but also feel like "overexcited bunnies" as they look at new questions to explore. Linköping University professor Peter Jonsson is set to have his work presented in two weeks' time at one of the most prestigious conferences in theoretical computer science. As of Monday, much of that work is "dead," he says, after AI showed that a 27-year-old hypothesis underpinning it is wrong. Both OpenAI and Anthropic claimed this week to have disproved the exponential time hypothesis (ETH).

AI is becoming part of everyday decision-making in many organisations. In healthcare, it can help professionals analyse large amounts of information, identify patterns and assess complex cases. But introducing AI does more than add a new tool. It can also change what people pay attention to, how they understand a problem and how a decision is reached. This is what Bijona wanted to understand in her doctoral research.

In cities, air pollution can vary sharply from one street to the next. Fumes may linger between tall buildings, collect at busy junctions or drift towards a school gate. However, cities often lack the detailed forecasts needed to act before levels become dangerous. For Professor Soledad Le Clainche, an applied mathematician at the Technical University of Madrid and leader of the ModelFLOWs research group, better understanding how air moves through cities could help tackle one of Europe's biggest environmental health challenges. As part of an EU-funded research project called MODELAIR, Le Clainche is working with researchers in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK to make the invisible, highly local patterns of urban pollution easier for cities to understand.

This week saw researchers gather in Malmö at the ninth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) . We cast an eye over social media platforms to find out what participants got up to at the event. The 9th annual AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES-26) is underway in Malmö. We are looking forward to a robust program full of educational and networking opportunities. Today at #AIES2026 in Malmö I joined the panel on Participation, Sovereignty, and Power in AI Governance with The Mitigation Paradox, joint work with Mina Schütz, Martin Kappes and Marc-Oliver Pahl. 3 takeaways: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23302284

The ninth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) is taking place in Malmö, Sweden from 12-14 October 2026. The panel discussion will take place on Tuesday 13 October. Find out more at the conference webpage . Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub. Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School All Series IKEA and Xbox's YXSTABY gaming furniture is functional without being in your face The X-shaped cushion seems surprisingly useful. Amanda Yeo is an Assistant Editor at Mashable, covering entertainment, culture, tech, science, and social good. Based in Australia, she writes about everything from video games and K-pop to movies and gadgets. IKEA's collaboration with Xbox is now live, offering nine new gaming-inspired furniture pieces and accessories. Called the YXSTABY collection, an IKEA spokesperson told Mashable the collaboration was named after a small locality in Sweden, which was chosen because it includes the four letters on the Xbox controller's buttons: X, Y, B, and A. The YXSTABY collection was previously unveiled at Gamescom in August, showing off nine pieces co-designed by the teams at IKEA and Xbox.

Technology Security Sweden's solution to stop spam callers: Be ruder! Authorities are urging residents to forget good manners and hang up on suspicious callers. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. It's okay to be rude to scam callers. Swedish police have a message for anyone who thinks they're talking to spam callers: hang up the phone, and embrace being rude.

Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has resigned after his ruling right-wing bloc was narrowly defeated by the centre-left opposition in the country's general election. He made the announcement in a post on X on Thursday afternoon, after preliminary votes from Sunday's election showed about 50,000 votes separated the two blocs in the country of about 10 million people. Opposition parties led by Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democrats look set to win 176 seats in the 349-seat Riksdag, Sweden's parliament. Kristersson, a conservative, had been supported in government by the anti-immigration hard-right Sweden Democrats (SD), and had promised them cabinet jobs if he won the election. His right-wing bloc looks set to win 173 seats in the Riksdag, according to data from the Swedish Election Authority.