AI is no longer just a translator or image recognizer. Today, we engage with systems that remember our preferences, proactively manage our calendars, and even provide emotional support. They build ongoing bonds with users. They change their behavior based on our habits. They don't just wait for commands; they suggest next steps.

AI is coming to Olympic judging: what makes it a game changer? As the International Olympic Committee (IOC) embraces AI-assisted judging, this technology promises greater consistency and improved transparency. Yet research suggests that trust, legitimacy, and cultural values may matter just as much as technical accuracy. In 2024, the IOC unveiled its Olympic AI Agenda, positioning artificial intelligence as a central pillar of future Olympic Games. This vision was reinforced at the very first Olympic AI Forum, held in November 2025, where athletes, federations, technology partners, and policymakers discussed how AI could support judging, athlete preparation, and the fan experience.

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.

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 4 February and 31 March 2026. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Carolina Osorio (Google Research and HEC Montreal) Association of European Operational Research Societies To receive the seminar link, sign up to the mailing list . Sashank Varma (Georgia Tech) University of Minnesota Zoom registration is here . Vicky Kalogeiton (École Polytechnique) AIDA Zoom link is here .

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.

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, and other selected AI practitioners, are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report. In the third panel, the AI experts tackle the topic of AI reasoning. They consider the definition of reasoning, what reasoning is and what it should be in our AI models, planning techniques, model training, making smart (and not to smart choices) about which AI products to use, guarantees, why we shouldn't imitate human reasoning in AI models, thinking about the future, and more.

In the road traffic example, the network predicts probabilities for each agent's identity, action and position. At inference, logical rules are evaluated using these predictions. The resulting satisfaction degree is then used to update the network so that future predictions better align with the knowledge constraints, as illustrated in Figure 2.

What are small language models and how do they differ from large ones? Microsoft recently released its latest small language model that can operate directly on the user's computer. If you haven't followed the AI industry closely, you might be asking: what exactly a small language model (SLM)? As AI becomes increasingly central to how we work, learn and solve problems, understanding the different types of AI models has never been more important. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are in widespread use.