Doctoral Consortium Program

Program: August 18, 2025

Location: 522C

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)

Fairness in Large Language Models: Challenges and Directions
(Zichong Wang; Florida International University, USA)

Joint Q&A (12 minutes)
10:30 – 11:00 (30 mins)Coffee Break
11:00-12:00 (60 mins)Invited Talk : Topic: Getting a Job after Grad School?
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)  

Bidirectional Search while Ensuring Meet-In-The-Middle via Effective and Efficient-to-Compute Termination Conditions
(Yi Wang; University of New Hampshire, 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, University of São Paulo, Brazil)

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
Professor Mehul Bhatt (Örebro University, Sweden)
Professor Eugene Freuder (Emeritus, University College Cork, Ireland)
Professor Cynthia Rudin (Duke University, USA)
Professor Reid Simmons (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
17:00 – 17:10Closing Remarks

Poster Session: 

Tentatively August 19, 2025 for full DC presentations. 

Conference poster presentation for short presentations determined by IJCAI Main Track.

Invited Talk

Topic: Getting a Job after Grad School?

Peter Stone (The University of Texas at Austin)

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

Professor Mehul Bhatt (Örebro University, Sweden)

Mehul Bhatt is a Professor of Computer Science at Örebro University, Sweden, specializing in spatial cognition, human-centered AI, and logic-based reasoning. His research particularly emphasises the study of human-behaviour (embodied multimodal interaction) in naturalistic settings as a principal means of AI technology driven human-centred cognitive assistance in planning, decision-making, design situations requiring an interplay of commonsense, creative, and specialist visuospatial thinking.. He has held research positions in Germany and Australia and is a recipient of prestigious fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. Bhatt leads efforts to develop AI systems that understand and interact with space in ways aligned with human perception and behavior.

Professor Eugene Freuder (Emeritus, University College Cork, Ireland)

Professor Freuder is a University College Cork Emeritus Professor and an Associate of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his Ph.D. from MIT. Professor Freuder is a recipient of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, and both the Research Excellence Award and the Distinguished Service Award of the Association for Constraint Programming. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. Professor Freuder is the President of the Artificial Intelligence Scientific Organizations Coordinating Council. He served as a Councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and currently serves on its Conference Committee. He recently served on the AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research, and is currently co-editing a Special Track of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence on Constraint Programming and Machine Learning. Professor Freuder founded the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, which became one of the initial components of the Insight Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Data Analytics. Website: https://freuder.wordpress.com/

Professor Cynthia Rudin (Duke University, USA)

Professor Cynthia Rudin is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. She directs the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab, and her goal is to design predictive models that people can understand. Her lab applies machine learning in many areas, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and energy reliability. She holds degrees from the University at Buffalo and Princeton. She is the recipient of the 2022 Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (the “Nobel Prize of AI”), as well as the INFORMS Society of Data Mining Prize in 2024. She received a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.  She is the recipient of the 2025 IJCAI McCarthy Award.

Professor Reid Simmons (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

A researcher in autonomous mobile robots, Dr. Reid Simmons has been developing robot systems that can work reliably in unstructured, unknown environments. He also works in multi-robot systems and human-robot interaction. His areas of specialty include: robotics, Artificial Intelligence, autonomy, architectures for autonomous systems, robot navigation, multi-robot systems and human-robot interaction. Reid is the director of the JPMorgan Chase & Co. AI Maker Space at CMU.

List of mentors

  • Professor Hau Chan (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA)
  • Dr. Maria Chang (IBM Research, USA)
  • Professor Eugene Freuder (Emeritus, University College Cork, Ireland)
  • Professor Maria Gini  (University of Minnesota, USA)
  • Professor Kate Larson ((University of Waterloo, Canada)
  • Professor Tim Miller (University of Queensland)
  • Dr. Keerthiram Murugesan (IBM Research, USA)
  • Professor Fernando Santos (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
  • Professor Peter Stone ((University of Texas at Austin, USA))
  • Professor Nannan Wu (Tianjin University, China)

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, Canada)
  • Maria Gini (University of Minnesota, USA)
  • Mohamed Siala (INSA Toulouse & LAAS-CNRS)
  • Mohan Sridharan (University of Edinburgh, UK)
  • 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)

DC Program Chairs

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