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 fourth panel, the AI experts tackle the topic of AI and sustainability, exploring the critical balance between harnessing AI's potential and managing its environmental impact. They talk about: the growth of AI and its impact on infrastructure, looking beyond energy use, AI for accelerating breakthroughs, and strategies for investing in grid capacity and innovations.

How can robots acquire skills through interactions with the physical world? One of the key challenges in building robots for household or industrial settings is the need to master the control of high-degree-of-freedom systems such as mobile manipulators. Reinforcement learning has been a promising avenue for acquiring robot control policies, however, scaling to complex systems has proved tricky. In their work SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL, and introduce a method that renders real-world reinforcement learning feasible for complex embodiments. We caught up with Jiaheng to find out more.

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.

Find out more about our session on Wednesday 21 January.

We consider the problem of modifying a description logic concept in light of models represented as pointed interpretations. We call this setting model change, and distinguish three main kinds of changes: eviction, which consists of only removing models; reception, which incorporates models; and revision, which combines removal with incorporation of models in a single operation. We introduce a formal notion of revision and argue that it does not reduce to a simple combination of eviction and reception, contrary to intuition. We provide positive and negative results on the compatibility of eviction and reception for EL-bottom and ALC description logic concepts and on the compatibility of revision for ALC concepts.

His research focuses on multi-modal learning, specifically advancing large vision-language models, embodied intelligence, and out-of-distribution detection. Xiang has published over 40 papers in top-tier venues, including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, and ACM MM. He is the recipient of multiple awards, including the NTU Research Excellence Award and Best Student Paper at MIPR 2024, and serves as a reviewer for major AI conferences."

We're pleased to announce that we will be giving an introduction to science communication for AI researchers at AAAI this year. This will be held on Wednesday 21 January from 13:00 - 14:30. The session is part of the Undergraduate Consortium programme. However, if you are attending the conference and fancy finding out how you can communicate your research to a general audience in different formats, then you are more than welcome to join us. The session will comprise a talk, a Q&A, and the opportunity to try some of the activities presented in the tutorial. You will have the opportunity to receive advice on any science communication ideas or questions you have.