Chile's Torres Del Paine is famous for its stunning landscapes, but it's also home to a fierce predator: the puma. These majestic creatures feed primarily on guanacos, although the hunting success rate is not very high, especially for female pumas. The photographer followed this female and her two cubs for several days, before witnessing her hunting. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In Chile's famous Torres Del Paine National Park, a mother puma with her two cubs in tow attacks a guanaco.

What is your research area? My research topic, at a high level, hasn't changed much since my dissertation. It has always been the problem of physical scene understanding - building machines that see, reason about, and interact with the physical world. Besides learning algorithms, what are the levels of abstraction needed by Al systems in their representations, and where do they come from? I aim to answer these fundamental questions, drawing inspiration from nature, i.e., the physical world itself, and from human cognition.

This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark.

The Future of AI Research report, published in March 2025, aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. The report was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi and covers 17 different AI topics . Members of the report team, and other selected AI practitioners, are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report. In the fourth panel, the AI experts tackle the topic of AI and sustainability, exploring the critical balance between harnessing AI's potential and managing its environmental impact. They talk about: the growth of AI and its impact on infrastructure, looking beyond energy use, AI for accelerating breakthroughs, and strategies for investing in grid capacity and innovations.

ICINCO 2025 (22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics) received 158 paper submissions from 42 countries. To evaluate each submission, a double-blind paper review was performed by the Program Committee. After a stringent selection process, 43 papers were published and presented as full papers, i.e. completed work (12 pages/25' oral presentation), 86 papers were accepted as short papers (51 as oral presentation). The organizing committee included the ICINCO Conference Chair: Dimitar Filev, Ford Research, United States, and the ICINCO 2025 Program Chairs: Giuseppina Carla Gini, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and Radu-Emil Precup, Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania. At the closing session, the conference acknowledged a few papers that were considered excellent in their class, presenting a "Best Paper Award", "Best Student Paper Award", "Best Poster Award", and "Best Industrial Paper Award" for the conference.

You were awarded an Honourable Mention for the 2019 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award. What was the topic of your dissertation research, and what were the main contributions or findings? My PhD dissertation was on the topic of Visual Question Answering, called VQA. We proposed the task of open-ended and free-form VQA - a new way to benchmark computer vision models by asking them questions about images. We curated a large-scale dataset for researchers to train and test their models on this task.

This story appears in the March 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs Does anyone have a plan for what happens next? In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. They were operating at speeds that the human body--an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes--simply wasn't built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there's a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things. Still, the machines pressed on. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. So Massachusetts created the nation's first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call "negative externalities" but were then called "children's arms torn off," policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories--leading indicators that things in your society aren't going great--Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Measurement doesn't abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting--of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts--signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. It's one way a republic earns the right to be believed in. The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi has been handed further prison sentences of seven-and-a-half years by an Iranian court, her lawyer has said. The human rights activist was sentenced to six years for gathering and collusion, and one-and-a-half years for propaganda activities by a court in the north-eastern city of Mashhad, Mostafa Nili announced on social media on Sunday. Mohammadi was arrested in December for making provocative remarks at a memorial ceremony, Iranian authorities said at the time. Her family said she was taken to hospital after being beaten during the arrest . The 53-year-old was made a Nobel laureate in 2023 for her activism against female oppression in Iran.

This prestigious award is made for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. It is intended to recognize researchers in autonomous agents whose current work is an important influence on the field. Professor Sven Koenig was recognised . Sven Koenig is Chancellor's Professor and Bren Chair at the Computer Science Department of UC Irvine. A Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, and ACM, Professor Koenig has received several best paper awards from AAAI, ICALP and SoCS, and contributed to the community in numerous service roles, most recently having served as the conference chair of AAAI 2026.

A number of prestigious AAAI awards were presented during the official opening ceremony of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026) in Singapore, on Thursday 22 January. The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for Humanity recognises the positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The winner of this year's award is Shakir Mohamed Shakir has been recognised for . The Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award recognises outstanding contributions to automated planning, machine learning and robotics, their application to real-world problems and extensive service to the AI community. The annual AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award was created to honour a person (or group of people) who has made major contributions to AI education that provide long-lasting benefits to the AI community and society as a whole.