AIhub monthly digest: July 2025 – RoboCup round-up, ICML in Vancouver, and leveraging feedback in human-robot interactions

by Lucy Smith

30 July 2025

On the ball at RoboCup 2025

This month saw the running of RoboCup 2025, with the event taking place in Salvador, Brazil, from 15-21 July. Ahead of kick-off, we spoke to the general chair Marco Simões and caught up with Ana Patrícia Magalhães, lead organizer for RoboCupJunior, to find out more about their plans for the week.

You can find out what the participants got up to in our two round-ups from social media: #RoboCup2025: social media round-up 1 | #RoboCup2025: social media round-up part 2. If you missed the action, you can find the recordings of the livestreams here.

RoboCupRescue: an interview with Adam Jacoff

The RoboCupRescue League is an important element of the RoboCup competition and focuses on the challenges involved in search and rescue applications. We sat down with Adam Jacoff, co-founder of the RoboCupRescue league, former RoboCup Trustee, and chair of the organising committee, to find out more.

An interview with Nicolai Ommer: the RoboCupSoccer Small Size League

The Soccer component of RoboCup comprises a number of leagues, with one of these being the Small Size League (SSL). Ahead of the competition, we spoke to Executive Committee member Nicolai Ommer to find out more about the SSL, how the auto referees work, and how teams use AI.

Tackling the 3D Simulation League: an interview with Klaus Dorer and Stefan Glaser

A key development this year in the RoboCup 3D Simulation League has been the introduction of a new simulator. This was tested out at RoboCup2025 in a special challenge. Ahead of this, we chatted to Executive Committee Member Klaus Dorer, and Stefan Glaser, who is on the Maintenance Committee, to find out more.

International Conference on Machine Learning

Another major conference to take place during July was the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). Participants at this Vancouver event were treated to five invited talks, oral and poster presentations, affinity events, tutorials, and workshops. You can check out what some of the participants got up to in our two social media round ups: #ICML2025 social media round-up 1 | #ICML2025 social media round-up 2.

The prestigious ICML outstanding paper, outstanding position paper, and test-of-time awards were presented during the conference. You can find out who won these awards here. We’ll be publishing a series of blog posts and interviews with some of the winners, so keep an eye on our homepage over the next few weeks.

Introducing the NASA Onboard Artificial Intelligence Research (OnAIR) platform: an interview with Evana Gizzi

We spoke to Evana Gizzi, Artificial Intelligence Research Lead at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, about the NASA Onboard Artificial Intelligence Research (OnAIR) platform. This open-source software pipeline and cognitive architecture tool has been designed to aid space research and missions. Evana told us about some of the particular challenges of deploying AI-based solutions in space, and how the tool has been used so far. This work was presented at IAAI 2025, which was co-located with AAAI 2025.

Text-to-sound generation with Yuki Mitsufuji

Earlier this year, we spoke to Yuki Mitsufuji, Lead Research Scientist at Sony AI, about work concerning different aspects of image generation. Yuki and his team have since extended their work to sound generation, presenting work at ICLR 2025 entitled: SoundCTM: Unifying Score-based and Consistency Models for Full-band Text-to-Sound Generation. We caught up with Yuki to find out more.

Interview with Kate Candon: Leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions

In the latest of our interviews meeting the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants, we met Kate Candon, a PhD student at Yale University interested in understanding how we can create interactive agents that are more effectively able to help people. Kate told us how she is leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions.

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