AIhub monthly digest: October 2025 – energy supply challenges, wearable sensors, and atomic-scale simulations

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 attend AIES and ECAI, learn about policy design for two-sided platforms, discover how to balance speed and physical laws in atomic-scale simulations, and find out more about machine learning for chip design.

Conference on AI, Ethics and Society

October has been a busy month on the conference front. Over in Madrid, researchers gathered for the conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES). The event featured two keynote talks, panel discussions and poster sessions. The organisers also experimented with a slightly different format for the contributed talks. All speakers in a session gave their talks, then took part in a joint discussion on common themes, before the floor was opened to questions from the audience. During the opening ceremony, the winners of the best papers were announced. You can get a flavour of what participants got up to in our round up from social media.

European Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Still underway in Bologna is the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025), co-located with the 14th Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS-2025). During the official opening, the organisers highlighted the winners of this year’s outstanding paper awards. They also presented the EurAI Distinguished Service Award, which this year was bestowed jointly to Frank Van Harmelen and former AIhub trustee Carles Sierra. Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be featuring work from the conference, including interviews with some of the doctoral consortium participants, so watch this space.

Policy design for two-sided platforms with participation dynamics

In their paper Policy Design for Two-sided Platforms with Participation Dynamics, which was presented at ICML 2025, Haruka Kiyohara, Fan Yao and Sarah Dean investigated the participation dynamics in two-sided markets. In this interview, Haruka tells us more about such two-sided platforms, the main contributions of the work, and the experiments carried out to test the method.

Using AI to address energy supply challenges

As part of our series meeting the AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants, we heard from Janice Anta Zebaze. Janice works at the intersection of renewable energy systems, tribology, and artificial intelligence, and the aim of her research is to address energy supply challenges by leveraging AI to evaluate resource availability and optimize energy systems.

Developing frameworks for human activity recognition using wearable sensors

Another AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participant was Zahra Ghorrati, and we asked her more about her research developing frameworks for human activity recognition using wearable sensors. Her goal is to design deep learning models that are not only computationally efficient and interpretable but also robust to the variability of real-world data.

Applying machine learning to chip design and manufacturing

Lorenzo Servadei and his team at Sony AI are focused on researching and developing machine learning models to aid chip design and manufacturing. In this interview, Lorenzo tells us more about Electronic Design Automation, and how machine learning has been added into the mix to further advance the field of semiconductor chip design.

Machine learning for atomic-scale simulations: balancing speed and physical laws

Atomic-scale simulations give us a way to explore the microscopic behavior of matter. However, accuracy of these methods comes at a computational cost. Machine learning has allowed researchers to mimic quantum mechanical equations rather than solving them at every simulation step. In this blog post, Filippo Bigi, Marcel Langer and Michele Ceriotti write about work presented at ICML2025 in which they investigate the balance between speed and physical laws.

AAAI-26 referee process to include AI-generated reviews

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will be including AI-generated reviews in the process for their 2026 conference. As in previous years, the review process will comprise two phases. However, the differences this year are that: 1) during the first phase, two human-written reviews will be supplemented by an additional AI-generated review, and 2) once the reviews and author responses to the reviews are collected, an AI-generated summary will recap points of consensus and difference between the reviews. You can find out more here.

Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test

Chaired by Professor Dame Wendy Hall FRS, The Royal Society played host to a special event to mark the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test, where researchers reflected on Turing’s legacy and explored the future of AI. The event was recorded and you can catch it here.

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Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.