AIhub monthly digest: March 2025 – human-allied AI, differential privacy, and social media microtargeting

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month’s digest includes four interviews. We hear from two newly-elected AAAI Fellows, and two researchers at the start of their careers, to find out about their different research areas – human-allied AI, multilingual natural language processing, microtargeting and activity patterns on social media, and differential privacy.

Interview with Sriraam Natarajan: Human-allied AI

We are delighted to announce the launch of our interview series featuring the 2025-elected AAAI Fellows. We began the series in style, meeting Sriraam Natarajan to talk about his research on human-allied AI. Sriraam told us about his career path, just a few of the many research projects he’s been involved in, reflections on changes to the AI landscape, and his passion for cricket.

Multilingual natural language processing with Roberto Navigli

Our Fellows series continued in this interview with Roberto Navigli, whose area of interest is natural language processing. As well as his position as a Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, Roberto also runs Babelscape, a multilingual NLP spin-off company. We found out more about Roberto’s research and how he balances these two roles.

Tunazzina Islam on understand microtargeting and activity patterns on social media

We’ve also been meeting some of the PhD students who were selected to take part in the 2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium. In this interview, we heard from Tunazzina Islam whose expertise lies in computational social science, natural language processing, and social media mining and analysis. She told us about her work studying microtargeting and activity patterns on social media, something which earned her a best poster award at the 2025 AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium.

Interview with Lea Demelius: Researching differential privacy

Lea Demelius is another of the 2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium cohort. Based at the University of Technology Graz, her research centres on differential privacy with the goal of advancing the adoption of responsible machine learning models and shedding light on the practical and societal implications of integrating differential privacy into real-world systems. You can read our interview with Lea here.

AAAI 2025 – our coverage continues

As we mentioned in last month’s digest, we were lucky enough to attend the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025), which took place from 25 February – 4 March in Philadelphia. Our coverage of the event continued this month with news of the AAAI awards, the outstanding paper awards and social media round-ups of the conference: #AAAI2025 social media round-up: part one | #AAAI2025 social media round-up: part two.

In a series of posts, we’ll be featuring write-ups from some of the workshop organisers summarising their events. In the first of these articles you can read about the two sessions, namely: on “Artificial intelligence for music” and “AI4Research: towards a knowledge-grounded scientific research lifecycle”.

Shlomo Zilberstein wins the 2025 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

Congratulations to Shlomo Zilberstein for winning the 2025 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award. Shlomo was recognised for his work establishing the field of decentralized Markov Decision Processes (DEC-MDPs), laying the groundwork for decision-theoretic planning in multi-agent systems and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL).

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton win 2024 Turing Award

The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The pair have received the honour for “developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning”. In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning.

Future of AI report

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), has published a report on the Future of AI Research. The report, which was announced by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi during the AAAI 2025 conference, covers 17 different AI topics and aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. You can read the document in full here.

Our resources page
Our events page
Seminars in 2025
AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium interview series
AAAI Fellows interview series
AfriClimate AI series
AI around the world focus series
New voices in AI series

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.