This month we tackle the topic of young people and what AI tools mean for their future. Joining the conversation this time are: Sanmay Das (Virginia Tech), Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Michael Littman (Brown University), and Ella Scallan (AIhub). As AI tools have become ubiquitous, we've seen growing concern and increasing coverage about how the use of such tools from a formative age might affect children. What do you think the impact will be and what skills might young people need to navigate this AI world? I met up with a bunch of high school friends when I was last in Switzerland and they were all wondering what their kids should study. They were wondering if they should do social science, seeing as AI tools have become adept at many tasks, such as coding, writing, art, etc. I think that we need social sciences, but that we also need people who know the technology and who can continue developing it. I say they should continue doing whatever they're interested in and those jobs will evolve and they'll look different, but there will still be a whole wealth of different types of jobs.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. We caught up with Oliver Chang whose research interests span deep reinforcement learning, autonomous vehicles, and explainable AI. We found out more about some of the projects he's worked on so far, what drew him to the field, and what future AI directions he's excited about. Could you give us a quick introduction to who you are, where you're studying, and the topic of your research? I'm specializing in reinforcement learning applied to autonomous vehicles and UAVs.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. We sat down with Maxime Meyer to chat about his current research, future plans, and how he found the doctoral consortium experience. Could you start with an introduction to yourself, where you're studying and the topic of your research? My research focuses on large language models. Which aspect of large language models are you looking at?

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 2 March and 30 April 2026. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Farnaz Farzadnia, Sebastian Merten, Francesca Da Ros Association of European Operational Research Societies To receive the seminar link, sign up to the mailing list . Keyon Vafa (Harvard University) EPFL The Zoom link is here . Javier M. Moguerza (Research Centre for Intelligent Information Technologies) Association of European Operational Research Societies To receive the seminar link, sign up to the mailing list .

Why apply AI to figure skating? Skaters can always keep pushing, higher, faster, stronger. OOFSkate is all about helping skaters figure out a way to rotate a little bit faster in their jumps or jump a little bit higher. The system helps skaters catch things that perhaps could pass an eye test, but that might allow them to target some high-value areas of opportunity. The artistic side of skating is much harder to evaluate than the technical elements because it's subjective.

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.

How can robots acquire skills through interactions with the physical world? One of the key challenges in building robots for household or industrial settings is the need to master the control of high-degree-of-freedom systems such as mobile manipulators. Reinforcement learning has been a promising avenue for acquiring robot control policies, however, scaling to complex systems has proved tricky. In their work SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL, and introduce a method that renders real-world reinforcement learning feasible for complex embodiments. We caught up with Jiaheng to find out more.

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.

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 4 February and 31 March 2026. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Carolina Osorio (Google Research and HEC Montreal) Association of European Operational Research Societies To receive the seminar link, sign up to the mailing list . Sashank Varma (Georgia Tech) University of Minnesota Zoom registration is here . Vicky Kalogeiton (École Polytechnique) AIDA Zoom link is here .