This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 5 January and 28 February 2026. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Fiona Spuler (University of Reading) ECMWF Teams link is here . Iyad Rahwan (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) The Digital Humanism (DIGHUM) Initiative The talk will be livestreamed on YouTube here . Christopher O'Reilly (University of Reading) ECMWF Teams link is here .

Throughout the year we've reported on some of the larger stories, and some of the lesser-covered happenings, in our regular monthly digests. We look back through the archives and pick out one or two stories from each of our digests. This month, AI startup DeepSeek released DeepSeek R1, a reasoning model designed for good performance on logic, maths, and pattern-finding tasks. The company has also launched six smaller versions of R1 that are tiny enough to run locally on laptops. In Wired, Zeyi Yang reported on who is behind the startup, whilst Tongliang Liu (in The Conversation) looked at how DeepSeek achieved its results with a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors.

Over the course of the year, we've had the pleasure of working with many talented researchers from across the globe. As 2025 draws to a close, we take a look back at some of the excellent blog posts, interviews and podcasts from our contributors. Jiahui Zhang and Jesse Zhang to tell us about their framework for learning robot manipulation tasks solely from language instructions without per-task demonstrations. Hui Zhang writes about work presented at CoRL2025 on RobustDexGrasp, a novel framework that tackles different grasping challenges with targeted solutions. In this podcast from AAAI, host Ella Lan asked Professor Marynel Vázquez about what inspired her research direction, how her perspective on human-robot interactions has changed over time, robots navigating the social world, and more.

Claire chatted to Stefano Mintchev from ETH Zürich about robots to explore and monitor the natural environment. Stefano Mintchev is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Robotics at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. He has a Ph.D. in Bioinspired Robotics from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Italy, and conducted postdoctoral research at EPFL in Switzerland, focused on bioinspired design principles for versatile aerial robots. At ETH Zürich, Stefano leads a research group working at the intersection of robotics and environmental science, developing robust and scalable bioinspired robotic technologies for monitoring and promoting the sustainable use of natural resources. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

Claire chatted to Oluwami Dosunmu-Ogunbi from Ohio Northern University about bipedal robots that can walk and even climb stairs. Oluwami Dosunmu-Ogunbi (Wami) is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Ohio Northern University. Her research focuses on controls with applications in bipedal locomotion and engineering education. She is the first Black woman to receive a PhD in Robotics at the University of Michigan. During her Ph.D., she developed the Biped Bootcamp technical document, which she is transforming into an undergraduate curriculum --introducing students to bipedal robotics while providing advanced coursework for juniors and seniors.

In March 2025, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), published a report on the Future of AI Research . The report, which was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi covers 17 different AI topics and aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. As part of this project, members of the report team are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report. In the first panel, the AI experts tackled the considerations around artificial general intelligence (AGI) development. AIhub is dedicated to free high-quality information about AI.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. Named one of the world's top 100 voices shaping the future of AI, Tim El-Sheikh is a biomedical scientist and ex-pro athlete turned serial deeptech, AI and social entrepreneur since 2001 and is one of the pioneering, first-generation AI founders at London's Silicon Roundabout. Find more from Tim at the CEO Retort . This podcast was created and is run by Ben Byford and collaborators. The podcast, and other content was first created to extend Ben's growing interest in both the AI domain and in the associated ethics.

Chemical products such as medicines, plastics, soap, and paint are still often based on fossil raw materials. This is not sustainable, so there is an urgent need for ways to make a'materials transition' to products made from bio-based raw materials. To achieve results more quickly and efficiently, researchers at Radboud University in the Big Chemistry programme are using robots and AI. The material transition from fossil-based to bio-based (where raw materials are based on materials of biological origin) is a major challenge. Raw materials for products must be replaced without changing the quality of those products.

Australia's vast savannas are changing, and AI is showing us how Australia has the largest intact savannas on Earth . Savannas are an ever-changing mosaic of ecosystems - from the sparse grasslands to dense woodlands, forests and wetlands. They stretch from Cape York Peninsula in Queensland to the Kimberley in Western Australia, making up almost 25 per cent of Australia's landmass . Anticipating how savannas will change in the years ahead is crucial to help inform our decisions about land management and policy that reflect the region's cultural, environmental and economic values. To do this, our team created an artificial intelligence (AI) tool we've called Themeda, a name inspired by Themeda triandra, an iconic Australian native species known as'kangaroo grass' (as well as an acronym for Thematic Mapping of Ecosystem Dynamics).

When applied to medium-size language models (e.g., GPT2-large), Ctrl-G also beats its counterparts on standard benchmarks by large margins.