TC12 staged three workshops at the recent prestigious IJCAI Conference: AI for Sustainability (W14), AI for Global Security (W16), and AI for Knowledge Acquisition and Management (W26). This year, IJCAI was held in two locations: Montreal, Canada and Guangzhou, China.
The he AI for Sustainability Workshop brought together global experts from academia, industry and policy to examine how AI can contribute to sustainable future and the key needs to develop new AI approaches or improve existing ones.
AI4S was a great success with 20 presentations and three invited talks including Toktam Tabrizi (Western Sydney University online), Lynne Scheider (Grand Canyon University) and Margaret Havey (IFIP).
Why the Mineral Supply Chain is important for AI and Data Centres and the Environment
- AI and Sustainability – There is no Planet B
Across two busy days, the program showcased diverse aspects and applications of AI:
- Advances in AI techniques and methods: improving robustness, predictive modelling and semi-supervised learning for critical domains such as nuclear fusion and satellite imagery.
- Industrial sustainability: exploring the future of work, generative AI for Industry 5.0 and machine learning for product quality.
- Ecosystem resilience: leveraging AI for wildfire management, ecological forecasting and bio-inspired models to accelerate training.
- Service and governance: applying AI to ESG assessment, municipal waste management, urban governance and transparency in sustainability reporting.
- Global perspectives: insights from Australia, North and South Americas and Europe highlight both opportunities and barriers to sustainable transitions.
The discussions included AI’s dual role as both a transformative enabler and a subject of critical reflection – balancing innovation with environmental, ethical and societal considerations.
Overall, the conference highlighted AI’s potential to advance sustainability goals across industries, ecosystems and governance, while fostering dialogue on responsible adoption and long-term impact.
Some findings and challenges included: the fact that AI is energy hungry, the need to bring AI closer to humans (efficiency), AI boundaries and challenges, alternatives to data scarcity, NASA observations are helpful to prevent wildfires, and more.
- AI for Global Security
As part of the IJCAI Conference, TC12 took part in AI for Global Security (AI4GS) as a Workshop on 17 August. Held at the “Palais des Congrès de Montréal”, the event attracted delegates from all over the world to share their experiences.
After an introduction by Eunika Mercier-Laurent painting the evolving big picture of global security, the AI4GS Workshop included sessions on AI in Military Applications and AI in Ethics and Cybersecurity featuring interesting talks by IFIP TC WG12.13 domain experts. The organisers are planning to expand the AI4GS spectrum of applied domains at future events.
- AI4KM (W26)
The AI4KAM (Artificial Intelligence for Knowledge Acquisition and Management) workshop was also held on August 17 as part of IJCAI 2025. Organised with support from IFIP and the Wroclaw University of Economics and Business, it brought together researchers, practitioners and industry experts from around the world. Its goal was to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world applications, showcasing how AI can transform knowledge-intensive environments across sectors.
The event was formally opened by Iwona Chomiak-Orsa and Maciej Pondel (workshop chairs), who underlined the significance of integrating AI into knowledge management processes at a time of rapid technological change. They highlighted the workshop’s mission to facilitate collaboration across academia, industry and government, encouraging participants to co-create solutions for pressing knowledge management challenges.
The day featured seven thematic sessions, offering a rich program of peer-reviewed presentations. Key themes included:
- AI for Organizational Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence: Novel approaches for decision support, enterprise-specific solutions and synergy-driven management system optimisation.
- Customer and Relationship Knowledge: AI-based prosumer classification, psychophysiological modelling of consumer behaviour, and applications of avatars and multi-agent systems in marketing.
- Smart Cities and Education: AI-driven urban governance, public service decision-making and ethical and pedagogical implications of AI in higher education.
- Business Applications and Forecasting: Use of self-supervised learning, generative AI and sentiment analysis for market predictions and operational improvements.
- Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis: Automation of decision models, applications of large language models in legal contexts and generative AI for semantic knowledge extraction.
- Healthcare and Medicine: AI-enabled clinical data integration, regional digital medicine centres and applications in veterinary knowledge management.
These contributions reflected the workshop’s focus on connecting methodological innovation with applied case studies, offering a comprehensive view of AI’s role in knowledge management.
Keynote Address
The invited talk, “Embedded Intelligence – Implementing Intelligent IT Solutions: Promise or Peril?”, was delivered by Professor Joel Alleyne (University of Toronto). Professor Alleyne explored the concept of embedding AI capabilities directly into systems and devices, allowing for local, real-time decision-making. He outlined both the promises – such as smart hospitals, predictive patient monitoring and intelligent urban infrastructure – and the perils, including bias, privacy risks, loss of human agency and existential threats. Drawing on perspectives from thought leaders like Yuval Noah Harari and Geoffrey Hinton, he emphasised the need for robust governance, ethical safeguards, and human-centred AI design.
Panel Discussion and Closing
The day concluded with a panel discussion featuring experts from academia, industry, and public administration, who debated strategies for aligning AI systems with human values. Topics included bias mitigation, regulatory requirements, and approaches to ensuring that AI enhances human decision-making rather than replacing it. The consensus reinforced the workshop’s central message: AI should be a tool for augmenting human capabilities and fostering innovation in knowledge management.
Visit to Mila – Quebec Institute of AI
Directly after IJCAI, Eunika Mercier-Laurent and Margaret Havey visited Mila, the Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence and one of three Canadian AI Institutes supporting the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Founded by Yoshua Bengio (2018 Turing Award winner for Advances in Deep Neural Networks with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun), Mila is a world leader in Deep Learning.
Mila is located in an area of Montreal focused on innovation called Mile-Ex, just two blocks over from Little Italy. The two ladies were given a tour of the facility, which includes two buildings – one that serves as the Mila research centre and an adjoining building that houses companies collaborating with them to turn research findings into commercial applications.
After the tour they met with their Mila contact for a general discussion about their mutual interests in AI, exploring areas of common ground such as Mila’s focus on leveraging AI for a sustainable future and the work they do in their AI for Climate Studio.
Margaret and Eunika declared it a good first meeting!