The 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence took place in Singapore from 20-27 January, the first time that the event has been held outside of North America. In our first social media round up we had a peak at the first half of the conference which hosted the tutorials, the bridge programme, and the doctoral and undergraduate consortia, as well as the start of the technical programme. Now, we pick some highlights from the second half, which saw a number of invited talks, technical sessions, posters, and the workshops. Do VLMs actually'see' or just rely on priors? He showed how models fail to count stripes on a shoe simply because they recognize the'Adidas' logo and hallucinate the standard 3 stripes.

Find out more about our session on Wednesday 21 January.

The 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025) took place in Bologna, Italy, from 25-30 October 2025. On the first two days of the event, the workshops, tutorials and doctoral consortium took place, with the main conference running from 27-30 October. We've collected some social media posts from attendees to give a flavour of the happenings from the past week. So many great presentations, it's hard to choose. If you're around and open to connecting, I'd love to chat.

The 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025) took place from October 19 to 25, 2025 in Hangzhou, China. The programme included plenary and keynote talks, workshops, tutorials, forums, competitions, and a debate. There was also an exhibition where companies and institutions were able to showcase their latest hardware and software. We cast an eye over the social media platforms to see what participants got up to during the week. Truly enjoyed discussing the consolidation of specialist and generalist approaches to physical AI at #IROS2025.

This week saw researchers gather in Madrid at the eighth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) . As well as keynote talks, panels and poster sessions, the organisers experimented with a slightly different format for the contributed talks. All speakers in a session gave their talks, then contributed in a joint discussion on common themes, before the floor was opened to questions from the audience. We cast an eye over social media platforms to find out what participants got up to at the event. Find out what's on the agenda at #AIES2025 next week.

Large language models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for simulating social media dynamics at scale, enabling studies that would be ethically or logistically challenging with human subjects. However, the field lacks standardized data resources for fine-tuning and evaluating LLMs as realistic social media agents. We address this gap by introducing SIMPACT, the SIMulation-oriented Persona and Action Capture Toolkit, a privacy respecting framework for constructing behaviorally-grounded social media datasets suitable for training agent models. We formulate next-action prediction as a task for training and evaluating LLM-based agents and introduce metrics at both the cluster and population levels to assess behavioral fidelity and stylistic realism. As a concrete implementation, we release BluePrint, a large-scale dataset built from public Bluesky data focused on political discourse. BluePrint clusters anonymized users into personas of aggregated behaviours, capturing authentic engagement patterns while safeguarding privacy through pseudonymization and removal of personally identifiable information. The dataset includes a sizable action set of 12 social media interaction types (likes, replies, reposts, etc.), each instance tied to the posting activity preceding it. This supports the development of agents that use context-dependence, not only in the language, but also in the interaction behaviours of social media to model social media users. By standardizing data and evaluation protocols, SIMPACT provides a foundation for advancing rigorous, ethically responsible social media simulations. BluePrint serves as both an evaluation benchmark for political discourse modeling and a template for building domain specific datasets to study challenges such as misinformation and polarization.

The 34rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-25) took place in Montréal, Canada, from 16-22 August. The programme featured keynote talks, tutorials, workshops, competitions, and oral and poster presentations. Find out what the participants got up to during the main part of the conference. Part one of our round-up can be found here. Cynthia Rudin addressed the squishiness of interpretability in machine learning during her winning talk as the recipient of the IJCAI 2025 McCarthy Award.

The 34rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-25) is currently taking place in Montréal, Canada. The first couple of days saw the attendees enjoy some of the many tutorials and workshops on offer, with the doctoral consortium also being held. The official opening ceremony took place this morning (Tuesday 19 August). Find out what the participants have been getting up to so far. Find out more about what the event has in store: @ijcai.org

The 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2025) took place in Vancouver, Canada, from 13-19 July. As well as five invited talks, the programme included oral and poster presentations, affinity events, tutorials, and workshops. Find out what participants got up to during the second half of the event. Find us at Poster E-2807 from 11 AM today. Excited to connect and discuss!

The 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2025) is currently taking place in Vancouver, Canada, running from 13-19 July. As well as five invited talks, the programme boasts oral and poster presentations, affinity events, tutorials, and workshops. Find out what participants have been getting up to during the first couple of days. On my way to #ICML2025 to present our algorithm that strongly scales with inference compute, in both performance and sample diversity! Reach out if you'd like to chat more!