Image provided by the authors – generated using Gemini. For many of us, artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of everyday life, and the rate at which we assign previously human roles to AI systems shows no signs of slowing down. AI systems are the crucial ingredients of many technologies -- e.g., self-driving cars, smart urban planning, digital assistants -- across a growing number of domains. At the core of many of these technologies are autonomous agents -- systems designed to act on behalf of humans and make decisions without direct supervision. In order to act effectively in the real world, these agents must be capable of carrying out a wide range of tasks despite possibly unpredictable environmental conditions, which often requires some form of machine learning (ML) for achieving adaptive behaviour.

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 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.

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 IJCAI-25 logo and theme photo (cropped). The 34rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-25) will be held in Montréal, Canada from 16-22 August. The programme will feature keynote talks, tutorials, workshops, competitions, and oral and poster presentations. There will also be four special tracks, focussing on: AI for social good, AI and arts, human-centred AI, and AI enabling critical technologies. An exciting addition this year is the satellite event, to be held in Guangzhou, China, from 29-31 August.