Every year, the prizes recognize the weirdest research that often raises some very serious scientific questions. Achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. That's the motto of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual competition that--parodying the Nobel Prizes--recognizes some of the world's most unusual scientific studies. The organization Improbable Research has been hosting the event since 1991 with the aim of showing that science also has a humorous side in its quest to meaningfully answer questions about the world. This year the ceremony was held in Zurich, Switzerland, and recognized 10 research projects ranging from an attempt to scientifically define what a kiss is to an experiment that used buried underwear to assess soil health.

Contestants from the U.S., Canada, Chile, and Colombia highlight how birds connect us across continents. 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. This photo of a common merganser (Mergus merganser) in East Bay Sandbar, Nova Scotia, Canada won the female bird prize for contestants in the United States and Canada. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place in the next couple of months. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Jie Chao (Concord Consortium) Raspberry PI Sign up here to join. Pierre Marion (INRIA) EPFL The Zoom link is here . Stefan Klein and Anna Bon The Digital Humanism (DIGHUM) Initiative The talk will be livestreamed on YouTube here .

AIhub monthly digest: August 2026 - IJCAI-ECAI in Bremen, the mathematics of simplicity, and does AI change the way we think? 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 report on events at IJCAI-ECAI 2026, learn about the mathematics of simplicity, investigate the accountability vacuum, and find out how AI changes the way we think. On Rashomon sets, the mathematics of simplicity, and why we don't need black boxes: an interview with Cynthia Rudin In the latest in our series of interviews with AI pioneers, we hear from Cynthia Rudin about interpretability, noise, and the case against complexity for complexity's sake. The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) was held from 15-21 August, in Bremen, Germany.

Robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers, is an increasingly common sight. But these machines aren't yet the do-it-all assistants you'd want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it's labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach these machines so many actions across different settings. "One natural idea is to use simulation as a training ground. While there has been significant progress over the last few years in the physics engines that power robotics simulators, one of the remaining challenges has been creating sufficiently rich and diverse simulation content to capture the complexity of the real world," says Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

RoboCup 2026 saw history made, as two teams of 11 humanoids took to the soccer field, the first time a full complement of robots has competed. The game saw (Bremen, Germany) take on (Leipzig, Germany), with both sides using machines designed by Booster Robotics. Back in 1997, RoboCup's founders set the lofty goal of developing a team of autonomous robots that could beat the human World Cup champions by 2050. There has been significant progress since those early days, and this match saw another step towards that ambition. "This match shows how far humanoid robotics has come," said Ubbo Visser, President of the RoboCup Federation.

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) took place in Bremen, Germany from 15-21 August. In the second of our social media round-ups we find out about the doctoral consortium, drop into the keynotes, and look back on an action-packed week. If you missed it, you can catch our round-up part 1 here . Today: presented my work, LLM Parametric Knowledge Gaps as a Democratic Harm, at the Augmented Democracies Workshop, IJCAI-ECAI 2026. Jaap Jumelet, UvA, was awarded the 2025 EurAI Dissertation Award for his outstanding PhD thesis Finding Structure in Language Models by the EurAI Board member and 2025 EurAI Disseration Award Chair Fredrik Heintz, https://t.co/Uo8YHTNSRK

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) distinguished paper awards recognise some of the best papers presented at the conference each year. This year, three articles were named as distinguished papers . In approval-based budget division, the task is to allocate a divisible resource to the candidates based on the voters' approval preferences over the candidates. For this setting, Brandl et al. [2021] have shown that no distribution rule can be strategyproof, efficient, and fair at the same time. In this paper, we aim to circumvent this impossibility theorem by focusing on approximate strategyproofness.

On Rashomon sets, the mathematics of simplicity, and why we don't need black boxes: an interview with Cynthia Rudin Welcome back to AI Pioneers - in-depth conversations with those shaping the field . This time, we speak with Cynthia Rudin, a trailblazer in the field of interpretable machine learning. Winner of the 2022 Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, Cynthia's algorithms are already predicting seizures, aiding crime detection, and powering biological research . We discuss black boxes, Rashomon sets, and what's next for her lab - from cancer detection to interpretable AI-generated music. Can you tell me a bit about your background - what drew you into the field of interpretable machine learning?

Florent Delgrange won the Best Blue Sky Paper Award at AAMAS 2026 for his work Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments . We caught up with him to find out more about his vision for agent learning. What is the topic of your Blue Sky Ideas paper and why is it an interesting area for study? My Blue Sky Ideas paper asks a simple but difficult question: how can an autonomous agent keep learning as its world changes without quietly losing the guarantees that made its behavior trustworthy? Reinforcement learning and formal methods address complementary parts of this problem.