AIhub monthly digest: June 2025 – gearing up for RoboCup 2025, privacy-preserving models, and mitigating biases in LLMs

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, we hear about explainable AI for robotics, explore privacy-preserving generative models, and find out what RoboCup 2025 has in store.

Preparing for kick-off at RoboCup2025: an interview with General Chair Marco Simões

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.

Ana Patrícia Magalhães tells us about RoboCupJunior

An important element of the RoboCup World Cup is RoboCupJunior, designed to introduce school children to the main competition. Ahead of the event, we spoke to Ana Patrícia Magalhães to find out more about the plans for 2025, and how RoboCup has inspired people of all ages.

Interview with Debalina Padariya: Privacy-preserving generative models

In our series of interviews meeting the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants, we heard from Debalina Padariya about her work on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, why this is such an interesting area for study, the different projects she’s been involved in so far during her PhD, and her experience at AAAI 2025.

Interview with Amar Halilovic: Explainable AI for robotics

Another Doctoral Consortium participant was Amar Halilovic, whose research focuses on explainable AI for robotics, investigating how robots can generate explanations of their actions in a way that aligns with human preferences and expectations, particularly in navigation tasks. In this interview, Amar explained what he has been up to in his PhD so far.

Understanding and mitigating biases in LLMs with Mahammed Kamruzzaman

In our third interview this month in the Doctoral Consortium series, Mahammed Kamruzzaman told us about his research understanding and mitigating biases in Large Language Models (LLMs). He is particularly interested in how these biases manifest across various sociodemographic and cultural dimensions.

IJCAI 2025 award winners revealed

The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced. These three distinctions, and respective winners are:

• Award for Research Excellence: Rina Dechter
• Computers and Thought Award: Aditya Grover
• John McCarthy Award: Cynthia Rudin

Generating counterfactual explanations

Ahead of the 34th International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2025), Shuyang Dong writes about work that she will present at the conference. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address “what if” scenarios, provide a promising avenue for understanding RL decisions. In her work, Shuyang proposes a framework for generating counterfactual explanations in continuous action RL.

King’s Festival of AI

Across five days in May, London played host to the King’s Festival of AI. Organised by King’s College London, the event was free to attend and suitable for all audiences. Recordings from some of the sessions are now available on the King’s YouTube channel playlist. You can find out how AI can transform the study of modern languages, what AI means for education, the challenges of communicating about AI, and more.

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Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.