Our annual series of conferences has reached its 45th year and was held once again at its regular venue at Peterhouse, Cambridge in December. I acted as AI-2025 conference chair as well as Technical Stream Chair. Frederic Stahl acted as Application Stream Chair and Adrian Hopgood acted as Workshop Organizer. Rosemary Gilligan acted as Treasurer and was also responsible for Local Arrangements. Papers accepted for poster presentation were again published as short papers in the proceedings. Juan Augusto organised the poster sessions, including chairing a session of short presentations by authors of poster papers, summarising the topics of their posters. The Group once again subsidized a reduced rate for non-presenting students. We again used the ConferenceExpert system for electronic submission and reviewing of papers.
The first day of the conference comprised half-day workshops on 'Generative AI', 'Ethical and Legal Aspects of AI', 'Promoting Safer AI for Health and Care', 'AI in Business and Finance' and 'Applied XAI in the Field'. For the first time the availability of a third lecture room enabled both the workshops and the refereed papers to be presented in three streams, rather than two.
The final programme included refereed papers by authors from 22 countries throughout Western and Eastern Europe plus Asia, North America and Oceania. All papers submitted were reviewed by an international panel of expert referees. There were prizes awarded for the best papers in the technical and application streams, the best paper in each stream of which the principal author was a student and the best presented poster. The conference proceedings were once again published by Springer in its prestigious Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series, a sub-series of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, under the name Artificial Intelligence XLII, marking the forty-second in an annual series of publications going back to our fourth annual conference in 1984.
There was no panel session this year. Instead there was a guest lecture by Al Brown from the Royal United Services Institute on the topical subject
of 'Warbots - a View from the Trenches'. The AI Open Microphone session was chaired by Nadia Abouayoub.
Our conference administrator was Kerry Wear from our parent body the BCS, with paper administration by Bryony Bramer. I am most grateful to all the organisers for their efforts on the Group's behalf.
Our Research Student Forum, FAIRS, continued for a seventeenth year. This is a nearly-free event for PhD and MRes/MPhil research students in the AI field, running on the day before the AI-2025 conference in the same venue, which once again was organised by Giovanna Martinez (Nottingham University). The Forum offered students the opportunity to meet other research students and to discuss their work with senior researchers and practitioners, with sessions covering guidance on conducting research and writing a thesis, feedback on research and research plans, and advice on undergoing a viva.
The SGAI virtual seminar series of free evening events delivered via Zoom continued in 2025, with talks on
'Symbolic AI versus Neuro-Symbolic AI' in March, 'Computer Vision Applications' in April and
the latest in our long-running series of 'Knowledge Discovery in Data' symposia in May.
The latest in our series of 'Real AI' events was held at the BCS London Office at the end of September, organised by Mathias Kern from BT. This event is designed to showcase practical applications of artificial intelligence, of particular interest to business and industry, and as before proved very successful.
For the third year a face-to-face symposium on AI for healthcare was organised by Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro at the BCS London Office in November.
This was another very successful event, bringing together participants from several areas of the healthcare community.
The term of office of Richard Ellis came to an end at the conclusion of the 2024 AGM and he indicated that he did not wish to stand for re-election, so
there was one post to fill by election. By the closing date, a nomination had been received for Dr Giovanna Martinez (University of Nottingham) and accordingly the Chair declared that she was elected for three years beginning at the close of the 2024 AGM.
SGAI has increased its involvement with other parts of our parent body, the British Computer Society, during the year, particularly with the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Branch, the Health and Care AI Specialist Group
and the BCS IT Leaders Forum. A number of joint events have been discussed.
The Group makes use of the Bluesky social media platform, with account name @BCS-SGAI and also LinkedIn. In addition, our list server AI-SGES is open to all (whether or not they are members of the Group), is free of charge and now has over 550 subscribers. Full information is available on the Group's website.
The Group's membership stood at 1,869 on November 17th 2025.
Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
Bluesky: @BCS-SGAI