RoboCup 2026 saw history made, as two teams of 11 humanoids took to the soccer field, the first time a full complement of robots has competed. The game saw (Bremen, Germany) take on (Leipzig, Germany), with both sides using machines designed by Booster Robotics. Back in 1997, RoboCup's founders set the lofty goal of developing a team of autonomous robots that could beat the human World Cup champions by 2050. There has been significant progress since those early days, and this match saw another step towards that ambition. "This match shows how far humanoid robotics has come," said Ubbo Visser, President of the RoboCup Federation.

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) took place in Bremen, Germany from 15-21 August. In the second of our social media round-ups we find out about the doctoral consortium, drop into the keynotes, and look back on an action-packed week. If you missed it, you can catch our round-up part 1 here . Today: presented my work, LLM Parametric Knowledge Gaps as a Democratic Harm, at the Augmented Democracies Workshop, IJCAI-ECAI 2026. Jaap Jumelet, UvA, was awarded the 2025 EurAI Dissertation Award for his outstanding PhD thesis Finding Structure in Language Models by the EurAI Board member and 2025 EurAI Disseration Award Chair Fredrik Heintz, https://t.co/Uo8YHTNSRK

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) distinguished paper awards recognise some of the best papers presented at the conference each year. This year, three articles were named as distinguished papers . In approval-based budget division, the task is to allocate a divisible resource to the candidates based on the voters' approval preferences over the candidates. For this setting, Brandl et al. [2021] have shown that no distribution rule can be strategyproof, efficient, and fair at the same time. In this paper, we aim to circumvent this impossibility theorem by focusing on approximate strategyproofness.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. This month we speak with Demetrios for the second time about: what ML and MLops are, narrow machine learning being still relevant, vibe coding, working with agents, talking to your computer, unknown productivity gains of LLMs, the chat interface as a bad interface for all knowledge, AIs that know when they're wrong, the lack of ground truth, and more Demetrios founded the largest community dealing with producitonizing AI and ML models. The MLOps Community is now where tens of thousands of practitioners come to learn from one another. In his free time he can be found building stone stackings in the woods with his daughters. This podcast was created and is run by Ben Byford and collaborators.

On Rashomon sets, the mathematics of simplicity, and why we don't need black boxes: an interview with Cynthia Rudin Welcome back to AI Pioneers - in-depth conversations with those shaping the field . This time, we speak with Cynthia Rudin, a trailblazer in the field of interpretable machine learning. Winner of the 2022 Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, Cynthia's algorithms are already predicting seizures, aiding crime detection, and powering biological research . We discuss black boxes, Rashomon sets, and what's next for her lab - from cancer detection to interpretable AI-generated music. Can you tell me a bit about your background - what drew you into the field of interpretable machine learning?

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) is currently taking place in Bremen, Germany. The first couple of days saw the attendees enjoy some of the many tutorials and workshops on offer. The official opening ceremony took place yesterday morning (Monday 17 August). Find out what the participants have been getting up to so far. Toby Walsh, UNSW, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Ethics Co-Chair, will deliver his AI Lecture, on Mon, Aug 17. Open to the general public, it offers a preview of themes explored in his forthcoming book, God AI: Boom or Doom?

Florent Delgrange won the Best Blue Sky Paper Award at AAMAS 2026 for his work Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments . We caught up with him to find out more about his vision for agent learning. What is the topic of your Blue Sky Ideas paper and why is it an interesting area for study? My Blue Sky Ideas paper asks a simple but difficult question: how can an autonomous agent keep learning as its world changes without quietly losing the guarantees that made its behavior trustworthy? Reinforcement learning and formal methods address complementary parts of this problem.

The 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) will be held from 15-21 August, in Bremen, Germany. The conference will feature workshops and tutorials, keynote and invited talks, technical presentations, posters, diversity and inclusion event, outreach, and more. Experts from research, practice, public institutions and civil society discuss how AI is changing key areas of everyday life in moderated panel discussions. The AI Lounges will be held in German. The tutorials will also take place from 15-17 August.

AIhub Coffee Corner: does AI change the way we think? This month we ask whether AI tools are changing the way we think. Joining the conversation this time are: Joydeep Biswas (The University of Texas at Austin), Sanmay Das (Virginia Tech), Rina Dechter (University of California, Irvine), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Michael Littman (Brown University), and Marija Slavkovik (University of Bergen). There's just so much to discuss there. I don't know how to start. First of all, it is definitely changing how we write code, develop code, think about correctness, and work on projects. Once upon a time, implementation used to be bottlenecked by writing the code. We are no longer bottlenecked by writing the code, we are bottlenecked in testing and understanding for correctness. As a researcher, there's a lot of what I would call throwaway tools.

Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy AI4Media Humans Do The Heavy Data Lifting Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 The Royal Statistical Society's AI Task Force has issued a critical mandate via a new paper, AI Regulation Needs Statistics, which demands that statistical principles actively shape global AI governance. The publication escalates the core argument of their foundational work, AI is Statistics . This earlier paper argued that AI is fundamentally statistical, meaning effective and ethical deployment is impossible without statistical literacy. You can watch our expert panel discuss the topic here . A major focus of that work was around the challenges of evaluating AIs, given that they are dynamic systems that continue to evolve once they have been deployed in the real world.