The annual RoboCup event, where teams gather from across the globe to take part in competitions across a number of leagues, will this year take place in Brazil, from 15-21 July. An important part of the week is RoboCupJunior, which is designed to introduce RoboCup to school children, and sees hundreds of kids taking part in a variety of challenges across different leagues. This year, the lead organizer for RoboCupJunior is Ana Patrícia Magalhães. We caught up with her to find out how the preparations are going, what to expect at this year's competition, and how RoboCup inspires communities. RoboCup will take place from 15-21 July, in Salvador, Brazil.

The Salvador Convention Center, where RoboCup 2025 will take place. RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal of advancing the state of the art of intelligent robots, AI and automation. The annual RoboCup event, where teams gather from across the globe to take part in competitions across a number of leagues, will this year take place in Brazil, from 15-21 July. We spoke to Marco Simões, one of the General Chairs of RoboCup 2025 and President of RoboCup Brazil, to find out what plans they have for the event, some new initiatives, and how RoboCup has grown in Brazil over the past ten years. RoboCup will be held in Salvador, Brazil.

Welcome to our October 2023 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, find out about recent events, and more. This month, we talk AI, bias, and ethics with Aylin Caliskan, learn more about probabilistic logic shields, knowledge bases, and sparse reward tasks, and find out why everyone should learn a little programming. AIhub ambassador Andrea Rafai met with Aylin Caliskan at this year's International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023), where she was giving an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight talk, and asked her about her work on AI, bias, and ethics. In this interview they discuss topics including bias in generative AI tools and the associated research and societal challenges. In their IJCAI article, Safe Reinforcement Learning via Probabilistic Logic Shields, which won a distinguished paper award at the conference, Wen-Chi Yang, Giuseppe Marra, Gavin Rens and Luc De Raedt provide a framework to represent, quantify, and evaluate safety.

The competition comprises a number of leagues, and among them is RoboCupJunior, which is designed to introduce RoboCup to school children, with the focus being on education. There are three sub-leagues: Soccer, Rescue and OnStage. Marek Šuppa serves on the Executive Committee for RoboCupJunior, and he told us about the competition this year and the latest developments in the Soccer league. I started with RoboCupJunior quite a while ago: my first international competition was in 2009 in Graz, where I was lucky enough to compete in Soccer for the first time. Our team didn't do all that well in that event but RoboCup made a deep impression and so I stayed around: first as a competitor and later to help organise the RoboCupJunior Soccer league. Right now I am serving as part of the RoboCupJunior Execs who are responsible for the organisation of RoboCupJunior as a whole.

Welcome to our August 2021 monthly digest where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, get the low-down on recent events, and much more. In this edition we cover IJCAI 2021, find out about new grants for climate research, hear about RoboCupJunior, and celebrate a significant birthday. The big event this month was the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21), held virtually from 19-26 August. Gathertown played host to proceedings and participants were treated to eight invited talks, panel discussions, poster sessions, and more. We're covering the invited talks in a series of articles.

RoboCupJunior (RCJ) is designed to introduce RoboCup to school children, with the focus being on education. RCJ offers several challenges, each emphasizing cooperation and problem-solving. This initiative provides an exciting introduction to the field of AI and robotics. Following the conclusion of this year's RoboCup, we spoke to trustee Amy Eguchi about RCJ and how the events went in this virtual edition. Amy has been involved with RCJ since 2000 and, in that time, has seen the number of participating teams grow from around 30 to 200.

RoboCup is an international initiative with the main goals of fostering research and education in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as of promoting science and technology to world citizens. The idea behind RoboCup is to provide a standard problem for which a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined, as well as being used for project-oriented education, and to organize annual events open to the general public, at which different solutions to the problem are compared. The eighth annual RoboCup--RoboCup 2004--was held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 27 June to 5 July. In this article, a general description of RoboCup 2004 is presented, including summaries concerning teams, participants, distribution into leagues, main research advances, as well as detailed descriptions for each league. As a result of this goal, from 1997 through 2000 robotic soccer matches composed the main part of the RoboCup events.

The RoboCupJunior division of RoboCup is now entering its third year of international participation and is growing rapidly in size and popularity. This article first outlines the history of the junior league since it was first demonstrated in Paris at RoboCup-1998 and describes how it has evolved into the international sensation it is today. Although the popularity of the event is self-evident, we are working to identify and quantify the educational benefits of the initiative. The remainder of the article focuses on describing our efforts to encapsulate these qualities, highlighting results from a pilot study conducted at RoboCupJunior-2000 and presenting new data from a subsequent study of RoboCupJunior-2001. In 1998, Lund and Pagliarini demonstrated the idea of a children's league for RoboCup, using robots constructed and programmed with the Lego Mindstorms kit that could play soccer (Land and Pagliarini 1998).

The RoboCupJunior division of RoboCup is now entering its third year of international participation and is growing rapidly in size and popularity. This article first outlines the history of the junior league since it was first demonstrated in Paris at RoboCup-1998 and describes how it has evolved into the international sensation it is today. Although the popularity of the event is self-evident, we are working to identify and quantify the educational benefits of the initiative. The remainder of the article focuses on describing our efforts to encapsulate these qualities, highlighting results from a pilot study conducted at RoboCupJunior-2000 and presenting new data from a subsequent study of RoboCupJunior-2001.