Each year, a small group of PhD students are chosen to participate in the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium . This initiative provides an opportunity for the students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. During 2026, we met with some of the students to find out more about their research and the doctoral consortium experience. Xiang Fang has been conducting his PhD research at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. Broadly speaking, his work focuses on multi-modal learning and embodied intelligence.

EU chief von der Leyen proposes'associate member' status for Canada Share EU chief von der Leyen proposes'associate member' status for Canada on social media European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has raised the prospect of Canada becoming the 27-nation European Union's first "associate member", a striking overture as both seek to pivot away from a hostile United States under President Donald Trump. Von der Leyen's statement on Wednesday came after Prime Minister Mark Carney said earlier this week that Canada was seeking a "unique alliance" with the EU, but not membership. "I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU," von der Leyen told Carney, who was attending her annual keynote speech. The first foreign head of government to attend the annual "State of the European Union" address, his visit comes in advance of an EU-Canada summit in Montreal next month. Carney will deliver his own address to the European Parliament on Thursday.

And what that came with for me was an absolute terror of quitting the day job, because there is no safety net. I was working retail in Toronto and Montreal. I became an assistant in New York. I had a really great job for a long time at The Rockefeller University. I was an admin in a cancer research lab, and I loved that. It was such a pleasure to be surrounded by such smart people doing interesting work, and the health insurance was incredible. I kept that job until a year after came out.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has championed the "Buy Canadian" movement, saying the power lies in "decisions taken at the kitchen table, not the boardroom table." Canadians are responding en masse, embracing patriotic shopping, even with the challenges it can present.

Alarm bells within the company should have stopped model training from going forward. By now you've probably heard about last month's major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a test. On Wednesday, OpenAI released a postmortem technical report on the incident, which I wrote about here . The day before OpenAI released that report, I spoke with David Krueger, a computer science professor and prominent alignment expert who took leave from the University of Montreal to found and lead an AI safety nonprofit called Evitable. He said what he had really hoped to see in the report was an analysis of the human factors behind the incident. "When you look at accidents and incidents, oftentimes people try to find the technical source of failure, but that can give a very inaccurate and misleading sense of why the failure occurred," he said.

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Dr François Pachet is an AI researcher and musician, and one of the most influential figures in AI and music. His innovative contributions have defined the field over the past decades through creative systems such as the Continuator, and Flow Machines, among others. After leading the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab and the Sony Computer Science Lab, he went on to create his own companies: Imagine All The People and Ynosound. In the context of IJCAI2025, he spoke about what deep learning changed, and what still remains wide open. He explains why tools like Suno and Udio--ChatGPT-like platforms for music generation--can produce astonishing results that still feel unsatisfying; why the next step for music generation requires combining sampling with search; and why the most important problems in artistic domains are, by nature, ill-defined--because there is no loss function to determine what is "good". Above all, he defends the importance of researcher autonomy: work on the questions that genuinely fascinate you, even when they fall outside prevailing trends--perhaps especially then. Thank you for joining me for this interview. Could you begin by telling us when was your first IJCAI and a memory related to it? I think the first IJCAI I attended was in Montreal in '95. I was there for a couple of workshops, one of them was about music and AI, and the other one I think was on advisor systems, something like that. And I remember there was a French colleague who was there also, at the time he was doing his PhD. And there was this researcher called Herbert Simon, who is a Nobel Prize pioneer of AI. I remember having chatted a little bit with this French guy who was very bold, and he just went up to Simon, said "Hey," and he started a conversation with him. And I was very impressed by the fact that you could meet those kinds of guys informally in a corridor or something at this conference.

Plus: Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yet. The power line that could reshape New York's grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State's grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City's electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec. One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it.

The latest interview in our series with the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants features Thi Kieu Khanh Ho who is studying time-series anomaly detection. We found out more about her research, and what inspired her to study AI, and what she plans to work on next. Tell us a bit about your PhD -- where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am doing my PhD at McGill University and Mila - Québec AI Institute, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, supervised by Professor Narges Armanfard. My research focuses on time-series anomaly detection, the problem of teaching AI systems to recognize when something unusual or abnormal is happening in complex, real-world data streams, without relying on large amounts of labeled examples.

Temporal Graph Learning (TGL) aims to discover patterns in evolving networks or temporal graphs and leverage these patterns to predict future interactions. However, most existing research focuses on learning from a single network in isolation, leaving the challenges of within-domain and cross-domain generalization largely unaddressed. In this study, we introduce a new benchmark of 84 real-world temporal transaction networks and propose Temporal Multi-network Transfer (MiNT), a pre-training framework designed to capture transferable temporal dynamics across diverse networks. We train MiNT models on up to 64 transaction networks and evaluate their generalization ability on 20 held-out, unseen networks. Our results show that MiNT consistently outperforms individually trained models, revealing a strong relation between the number of pre-training networks and transfer performance. These findings highlight scaling trends in temporal graph learning and underscore the importance of network diversity in improving generalization. This work establishes the first large-scale benchmark for studying transferability in TGL and lays the groundwork for developing Temporal Graph Foundation Models.