The 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023) will take place in Macao from 19-25 August 2023. The programme includes plenary talks, workshops, symposia and tutorials. In addition to the main track, there are two special tracks, namely AI for good, and AI, the arts and creativity. There will be nine invited plenary talks at the conference this year. The 27 tutorials taking place at this year's event are:

As part of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2022), 39 different workshops were held, covering a wide range of different AI topics. We hear from the organisers of the workshops on AI-Based Design and Manufacturing, and Graphs and more Complex structures for Learning and Reasoning, who provide a summary of their events. The first AI for Design and Manufacturing (ADAM) Workshop, conducted virtually as part of AAAI-22, was organized in order to bring together world experts in core AI, scientific computing, geometric modeling, design, and manufacturing. The primary objectives were to outline the major research challenges in this rapidly growing sub-field of AI; cross-pollinate collaborations between AI researchers and domain experts in engineering design and manufacturing; and sketch open problems of common interest. This one-day workshop consisted of two plenary talks, four keynote talks, and twenty-four lightning talks by authors of accepted papers.

Robotic grasping and manipulation has historically been dominated by rigid grippers, force/form closure constraints, and extensive grasp trajectory planning. The advent of soft robotics offers new avenues to diverge from this paradigm by using strategic compliance to passively conform to grasped objects in the absence of active control, and with minimal chance of damage to the object or surrounding environment. However, while the reduced emphasis on sensing, planning, and control complexity simplifies grasping and manipulation tasks, precision and dexterity are often lost. This talk will discuss efforts to increase the robustness of soft grasping and the dexterity of soft robotic manipulators, with particular emphasis on grasping tasks that are challenging for more traditional robot hands. This includes compliant objects, thin flexible sheets, and delicate organisms.

This month saw the European Conference on AI (ECAI 2020) go digital. Included in the programme were five plenary talks. In this article we summarise the talk by Professor Carme Torras who gave an overview of her group's work on assistive AI, and talked about the ethics of this field. Carme is based at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC) in Barcelona. Her lab includes an assisted living facility where the team can test their robots in real-life situations.

Sabater described current research in the area, presenting some of the current research lines and the shortcomings of present approaches. He also outlined some of the topics in which information-fusion and aggregation operators can play a role. The conference papers were published in Springer Verlag's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (volume 3885). Further information on the series is available at mdai.cat. The next MDAI conference will be held August 16-18, 2007, in Kitakyushu, Japan.