AAAI presidential panel – AI reasoning

by Lucy Smith

09 January 2026

share this:

This image features 3 images of a street. Overlying the image are different shapes which are arranged to look like QR code symbols. These are in white/blue colours and intersect one another. The first image is clear, but the second is slightly more pixelated, and the final image is very pixelated. Elise Racine & The Bigger Picture / Web of Influence I / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

In March 2025, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), published a report on the Future of AI Research. The report, which was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi covers 17 different AI topics and aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. As part of this project, members of the report team, and other selected AI practitioners, are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report.

In the third panel, the AI experts tackle the topic of AI reasoning. They consider the definition of reasoning, what reasoning is and what it should be in our AI models, planning techniques, model training, making smart (and not to smart choices) about which AI products to use, guarantees, why we shouldn’t imitate human reasoning in AI models, thinking about the future, and more.

Panel Members

Holger Hoos, RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and Universiteit Leiden
Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University

Moderator

Francesca Rossi, AAAI past president, IBM Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader

tags: AAAI, AAAI2025

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

AIhub is supported by:

The Machine Ethics podcast: Companion AI with Giulia Trojano

The Machine Ethics Podcast 08 Jan 2026

Ben chats to Giulia Trojano about AI as an economic narrative, companion chatbots, deskilling of digital literacy, chatbot parental controls, differences between social AI and general AI services and more.