AIhub monthly digest: December 2025 – studying bias in AI-based recruitment tools, an image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking, and end of year compilations

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 look into bias in AI-based recruitment tools, find out about a new image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking, dig into human-robot interactions and social robotics, and look back on another busy year in the world of AI.

Interview with Frida Hartman: Studying bias in AI-based recruitment tools

We’ve been meeting some of the PhD students that were selected to take part in the Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025). In the second interview of the series, we caught up with Frida Hartman to find out how her PhD is going so far, and plans for the next steps in her investigations. Frida, along with co-authors Mario Mirabile and Michele Dusi, was also the winner of the ECAI-2025 Diversity & Inclusion Competition, for work entitled “The Last 25 Years of Gender Distribution of Authorship in ECAI Proceedings”. This award was presented at the closing ceremony of the conference.

Interview with Alice Xiang: Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking

Sony AI have released a dataset that establishes a new benchmark for AI ethics in computer vision models. The research behind the dataset, named Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE), has been published in Nature. FHIBE is the first publicly-available, globally-diverse, consent-based human image dataset (inclusive of over 10,000 human images) for evaluating bias across a wide variety of computer vision tasks. We sat down with project lead, Alice Xiang, Global Head of AI Governance at Sony Group and Lead Research Scientist for AI Ethics at Sony AI, to discuss the project and the broader implications of this research.

Human-robot interactions and social robotics with Professor Marynel Vasquez

In this podcast from AAAI, host Ella Lan chats to Professor Marynel Vázquez about what inspired her research direction, how her perspective on human-robot interactions has changed over time, robots navigating the social world, potential for using robots in education, modeling interactions as graphs, addressing misunderstandings with regards to robots in society, getting input from target users, the challenge of recognising when errors happen, making robots that adapt, and more.

Doctoral Consortium compilation

Over the course of 2025, we’ve had the pleasure of talking to 21 of the PhD students who were chosen to participate in the AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium. You can find all of the interviews here.

Blog post and interview compilations

As the year draws to a close, we like to take a look back through our archives and revisit some of the excellent research of our contributors. We’ve been lucky enough to work with some talented researchers over the past 12 months. We’ve created two collections to highlight this work:
AIhub blog post highlights 2025
AIhub interview highlights 2025

Executive Order

On Thursday 11 December, Trump signed an executive order which seeks to block states from regulating AI. Another part of the order concerns the creation of a federal taskforce that will have the “sole responsibility” of challenging states’ AI laws.

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Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.