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.

'Congratulations, you have achieved nothing of worth ' 'Congratulations, you have achieved nothing of worth ' Friction-maxxing: could less convenience lead to much more happiness? The conveniences of modern life such as Uber Eats and ChatGPT are robbing us of satisfaction - and worse still, infantilising us. But should we really go back to the basics? Yes, obviously it is that. Let's all save time by you telling me what it used to be called.

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 eighth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) is currently taking place in Madrid, Spain, running from 20-22 October. During the opening ceremony, the best papers for this year were announced. While it is well-known that AI systems might bring about unfair social impacts by influencing social schemas, much attention has been paid to instances where the content presented by AI systems explicitly demeans marginalized groups or reinforces problematic stereotypes. This paper urges critical scrutiny to be paid to instances that shape social schemas through subtler manners. Drawing from recent philosophical discussions on the politics of artifacts, we argue that many existing AI systems should be identified as what Liao and Huebner called oppressive things when they function to manifest oppressive normality.

The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) distinguished paper awards recognise some of the best papers presented at the conference each year. This year, during the conference opening ceremony, three articles were named as distinguished papers. Abstract: Normative Restraining Bolts (NRBs) adapt the restraining bolt technique (originally developed for safe reinforcement learning) to ensure compliance with social, legal, and ethical norms. While effective, NRBs rely on trial-and-error weight tuning, which hinders their ability to enforce hierarchical norms; moreover, norm updates require retraining. In this paper, we reformulate learning with NRBs as a multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) problem, where each norm is treated as a distinct objective.

While pressing, this narrow focus overlooks critical human-centric considerations that shape the long-term trajectory of a society. In this position paper, we identify the risks of overlooking the impact of AI on the future of work and recommend comprehensive transition support towards the evolution of meaningful labor with human agency. Through the lens of economic theories, we highlight the intertemporal impacts of AI on human livelihood and the structural changes in labor markets that exacerbate income inequality. Additionally, the closed-source approach of major stakeholders in AI development resembles rent-seeking behavior through exploiting resources, breeding mediocrity in creative labor, and monopolizing innovation.

The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced. These three distinctions are: the Award for Research Excellence, the Computers and Thought Award and the John McCarthy Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. The winner of the 2025 Award for Research Excellence is Rina Dechter, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA . Professor Dechter is recognized for her seminal contributions to the fields of constraint satisfaction and probabilistic inference, including novel algorithmic frameworks, modeling ideas, complexity analyses, and unifying principles.

The AAMAS 2025 best paper and demo awards were presented at the 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, which took place from 19-23 May 2025 in Detroit. The Distinguished Dissertation Award was also recently announced. The Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award is given for dissertations in the field of autonomous agents and multiagent systems that show originality, depth, impact, as well as quality of writing, supported by high-quality publications.

The AAAI 2025 outstanding paper awards were announced during the opening ceremony of the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence on Thursday 27 February. Papers are recommended for consideration during the review process by members of the Program Committee. This year, three papers have been selected as outstanding papers, with a further paper being recognised in the special track on AI for social impact. Abstract: A fundamental task in multi-agent systems is to match agents to alternatives (e.g., resources or tasks). Often, this is accomplished by eliciting agents' ordinal rankings over the alternatives instead of their exact numerical utilities.