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.

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.

By 2050, scientists estimate that antibiotic-resistant infections will be associated with more than eight million deaths around the world every year. These are bacterial infections that resist traditional antibiotics like penicillin. They can develop when you eat contaminated food, have an open wound or undergo surgery. E. coli is a good example, as several strains have become highly resistant to conventional antibiotics . They can also arrive as secondary infections, like pneumonia after a virus .

The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced . These three distinctions are: the, the and the . The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. The winner of the 2026 Award for Research Excellence is Nicholas R. Jennings, Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University, UK. Professor Jennings is recognized for his seminal contributions to the field of multi-agent systems, including algorithms for multi-agent coordination and the principles of human-agent teamwork, and for his pioneering applications of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

The Future of AI Research report, published in March 2025, aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. The report was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi and covers 17 different AI topics . 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 next discussion in the collection, the four panellists tackle AI and scientific integrity. Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.