AIhub monthly digest: June 2026 – biodiversity, resource allocation, and color metaphors

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 found out how foundation models are being used for conservation efforts, how AI can help with scarce resource allocation, and how color metaphors and LLMs can teach us about human cognition. We also went to ICRA and captured some footage of cutting-edge robots. In this latest interview in our AAAI Fellow series, we found out about Tanya Berger-Wolf's research developing a foundation model for biology, the insights this model can provide for conservation and protecting ecosystems, interesting collaborations over the years, and what the future has in store. In this interview, we chat to Sanmay Das, who was elected as a Fellow "for development of multiagent interaction mechanisms and learning techniques in the public interest, and for leadership service to the profession".