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.

Generations in Dialogue: Bridging Perspectives in AI is a podcast from AAAI featuring thought-provoking discussions between AI experts, practitioners, and enthusiasts from different age groups and backgrounds. Each episode delves into how generational experiences shape views on AI, exploring the challenges, opportunities, and ethical considerations that come with the advancement of this transformative technology. In the fourth episode of this new series from AAAI, host Ella Lan chats to 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, potential for using robots in education, modeling interactions as graphs, addressing misunderstandings with regards to robots in society, getting input from target users, the challenge of recognising when errors happen, making robots that adapt, and more. Marynel Vázquez is a computer scientist and roboticist whose research focuses on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), particularly in multi-party settings. She studies social group dynamics--such as spatial behavior and social influence--in HRI, and develops perception and decision-making algorithms that enable autonomous, socially aware robot behavior.