Doctoral Consortium Program

Program: August 18, 2025

Location: TBA, Room TBA

9:00 – 9:05Welcome and Overview
Session 1: Trustworthy AI 1:  Society and Fairness
9:05 – 10:30 (90 mins)		4 Student presentations (13 min talk + 2 min Q&A each)   
F1: Agent-based Modelling for Policy-Making in Inequity Contexts (Alba Aguilera, IIIA-CSIC, Spain)
Measuring and Mitigating Homelessness Bias:  Leveraging AI for Social Impact (Jonathan Karr,  University of Notre Dame, USA)
Ensuring Reliable and Transparent Algorithmic Fairness through Optimal Transport and Uncertainty Quantification (Agathe Fernandes Machado, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)
Data-Centric AI for Chest X-Ray Analysis in Resource-Constrained Settings (Yasmeena Akhter, IIT Jodhpur, India)
2 lightning talks (5 min each)  
New Sequence-Independent Lifting Techniques for Cover Inequalities and When They Induce Facets (Siddharth Prasad, Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
All Roads Lead to Rome: Exploring Edge Distribution Shifts for Heterophilic Graph Learning (Yi Wang; University of New Hampshire, USA)
Joint Q&A (12 minutes)
10:30 – 11:00 (30 mins)Coffee Break
11:00-12:00 (60 mins)Invited Talk : Topic: TBA
Peter Stone, The University of Texas at Austin
 


Session 2: Machine Learning 1: RL, Reasoning, Theory & Optimization
12:00 – 12:30(30 mins)




1 Student Presentation (13 min talk + 2 min Q&A)    
Enhancing the Logical Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models (Fengxiang Cheng, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
2 lightning talks (5 min)  
fairGNN-WOD: Fair Graph Learning Without Complete Demographics (Zichong Wang; Florida International University, USA)
Beyond Symmetry in Repeated Games with Restarts( Ratip Emin Berker, Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Joint Q&A (5 minutes)
12:30 – 14:00 (90 mins)Lunch Break
Session 3: Trustworthy AI 2: Robustness and Interpretability
14:00 – 14:45 (45 minutes)		2 Student Presentations (13 min talk + 2 min Q&A) 
Visual Analytics for Guiding Feature Attribution Method Selection (Priscylla Silva, TU Delft)
Rating AI Models for Robustness Through a Causal Lens (Kausik Lakkaraju, University of South Carolina)

2  lightning talks (5 min) 
Online Resource Sharing: Better Robust Guarantees via Randomized Strategies (Daniel Hall, Cornell University, USA)
Beyond Winning Strategies: Admissible and Admissible Winning Strategies for Quantitative Reachability Games (Karan Muvvala, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA)
Joint Q&A (5 mins)
Session 4: Machine Learning 2: RL, Reasoning, Theory & Optimization
14:45 – 15:30 (45 mins)		3 Student Presentations (13 min talk + 2 min Q&A)  
Toward Interpretable Time Series Modeling: A Kernel Representation Perspective (Kunpeng Xu, University of Sherbrooke, Canada)
A Formal Theory of Optimal Learning with Experimental Results (Michael Bennett, Australian National University, Australia)
Transfer in RL via Q-Manipulation (Kevin Jatin Vora, Arizona State University, USA)
15:30 – 16:00 (30 mins)Coffee Break
16:00 – 17:00 (60 mins)Career Panel (Panelist Names, Inst)
17:00 – 17:10Closing Remarks

Poster Session: 

Tentatively August 19, 2025 for full DC presentations. 

Day of conference poster presentation for short presentations: Details will be emailed later.

Invited Talk

Topic: TBA

Peter Stone (The University of Texas at Austin)

Abstract : TBA

About the invited speaker

Dr. Peter Stone holds the Truchard Foundation Chair in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is Associate Chair of the Computer Science Department, as well as Director of Texas Robotics. In 2013 he was awarded the University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award and in 2014 he was inducted into the UT Austin Academy of Distinguished Teachers, earning him the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor. Professor Stone’s research interests in Artificial Intelligence include machine learning (especially reinforcement learning), multiagent systems, and robotics. Professor Stone received his Ph.D in Computer Science in 1998 from Carnegie Mellon University. From 1999 to 2002 he was a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department at AT&T Labs – Research. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, AAAI Fellow, IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and 2004 ONR Young Investigator. In 2007 he received the prestigious IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, given biannually to the top AI researcher under the age of 35, in 2016 he was awarded the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, and in 2024 he was awarded the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award. Professor Stone co-founded Cogitai, Inc., a startup company focused on continual learning, in 2015, and currently serves as Chief Scientist of Sony AI. 

Career Panel

TBA

List of mentors

  • TBA

List of reviewers

  • Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi (Columbia University)
  • Arthur Choi (Kennesaw State University)
  • Claude-Guy Quimper   (Université Laval)
  • Debarun Bhattacharjya (IBM Research)
  • Debdeep Mukhopadhyay (IIT KGP and NYU Abu Dhabi)
  • Dorothea Baumeister (Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences)
  • Edith Elkind (Oxford University)
  • Fernando Santos (University of Amsterdam)
  • Francesco Ricci (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)
  • Haris Aziz (UNSW Sydney)
  • Hau Chan (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
  • Hyung Jin Chang (University of Birmingham)
  • Jianfeng Ren (University of Nottingham Ningbo China)
  • Kate Larson (University of Waterloo)
  • Maria Gini (University of Minnesota)
  • Mohamed Siala (INSA Toulouse & LAAS-CNRS)
  • Mohan Sridharan (University of Edinburgh, UK)
  • Muhammad TayyabChaudhry (COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI) Lahore Campus, Pakistan)
  • Nannan  Wu (Tianjin University)
  • Neil Yorke-Smith (Delft University of Technology)
  • Ofer Ariel (Tel-Aviv Academic College)
  • Prajakta Nimbhorkar (Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai)
  • Qiang Cheng (University of Kentucky)
  • Samarth Swarup (University of Virginia)
  • Seulki Lee (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST))
  • Silvia Schiaffino  (ISISTAN (CONICET – UNCPBA))
  • Sundong Kim (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology)
  • Tim Miller (The University of Queensland)
  • Xiangyu Zhao (City University of Hong Kong)
  • Yara Rizk  (IBM Research AI)

DC Program Chairs

  • Anita Raja (City University of New York, Hunter College)
  • Maria Chang  (IBM)