Current Trends in Artificial Intelligence 2025-2026

Artificial Intelligence is moving at an incredible pace. In this course, the latest progress  in state-of-the-art AI is introduced.  Over the course of ten guest lectures, experts in their field come to talk about their latest research.  

Next to the theoretical part, in the AI challenges,  students from VUB will apply learnt techniques in a team, to create an AI powered application! AI challenges aims to hone students’ soft skills like teamwork, empathy, communication and critical thinking while building functional products  in agile teams. This year we will build a research tool for lawyers.

All lectures will take place in i.0.03

1. 13/2 Alvaro Vargas (VUB)
   • topic: Causal Federated Learning for Neuroimaging
   • materials: slides / video
2. 20/2 Maxime Favier (Syrtis)
   • ​topic: 
   • materials: slides / video not available 
3. 27/2 Arnau Dillen (VUB)
   • ​topic: 
   • materials: slides / video
4. 6/3 Dimitris Sacharidis
   • ​topic: Counterfactuals for Explainability and Fairness in Machine Learning
   • materials: video / slides
   • extra reading: Counterfactual Explanations: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00399
     Algorithmic Recourse: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07165
     Global Counterfactual Explanations: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18921
     Counterfactual Fairness: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06856
     Fairness of Algorithmic Recourse: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14978
5. 13/3  Ikhtiyor Nematov & Elizaveta Kuzmenko
   • topic: Source Attribution for Explainability of Black Box ML models
   • materials: video / slides
   • extra reading: 
     Influence Functions: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04730
     Intent-based Explanations: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16010
     Source Attribution in RAG: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04480
6. 20/3 CANCELLED
   • topic: 
   • materials
7. 27/3 Seppe Housen 
   • topic: 
   • materials:
8. 3/4 Hugues Bersini (ULB)
   • ​topic: 
   • materials:
9. 8/5  René Doursat (ISC-PIF)
   • topic: A World Outside LLMs: Drawing Inspiration from the Natural Intelligence of Complex Systems
   • materials:
10. 15/5 Patrick Van der Spiegel (VUB)
    • topic: Hierarchical Alphabet Automata
    • materials:
11. 22/5 Cédric Gilon (ULB)
    • topic:Beyond ChatGPT: the latest advances in LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Autonomous Agents

All detailed and official information about the course here >