Maria M. Hedblom

As the representative from JTH, I was an invited speaker at Folkuniversitetet’s “JU Live” on March 27th, 2025. My talk “Artificiell intelligens: Nobelpris, ”fake news” och framtidens science fiction” directed to the general public, gathered an AI-interested bunch of individuals and fostered an interesting discussion afterwards.

The university published an article on the talk. For those interested, you can read it here:
https://ju.se/center/spark/en/news/news-archive/2025-03-28-great-interest-in-ai-lecture.html

I am happy to announce that earlier this year, JTH’s Associate Dean of Research appointed me as the area of strength (AoS): Human-Centred Industrial AI (HCIAI)’s scientific leader.

Together with co-leader Tuwe Löfström and the two other AoS’s respective leaders, I have the privilege to assist in directing and guiding in the development of scientific policies at the School of Engineering, Jönköping University.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the amazing honour of being contacted by Ajay Sivakumaran Kumar, one of the student writers for Jönköping University’s student magazine EDIT. He asked me if I would be willing to participate in an interview in which the students of the university could get to know the professors a bit better.

The result of the interview was published today in an article series called “Professors Beyond Academia”. I am truly very proud to have been asked and to have the opportunity to showcase to the students that we “professors are people as well”. 🙂

You can read the article here:
Professors Beyond Academia | EDIT

This November I am honoured to participate in two fantastic scientific conferences.

First, I participated at the 7th Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT) in Madrid (ES) where my student presented our paper: Aguirregomezcorta Aina & Hedblom (2024) “Twist and Snap: A Neuro-symbolic System for Affordance Learning of Opening Jars and Bottles”.

This week, I am participating in the 23rd edition of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence’s annual conference AI*IA, in Bozen-Bolzano (IT). The conference hosts over 20 workshops – one of which is the 8th edition of the Image Schema Day (ISD8) which we organise on Wednesday-Thursday.

In addition to 12 paper presentations, ISD8 has two keynote speakers – Prof. John Bateman, University of Bremen (DE) and Prof. Zoe Falomir and for the first time, an interactive Tutorial run by Dr. Mihai Pomarlan, Dr. Stefano De Giorgis and Dr. Nikolaos Tsiogkas! This edition of the workshop will be great!

Honoured to have a job that allows me to learn during office hours.

On September 16th and 18th, I had the fantastic honour of talking about AI at Jönköping’s Senioruniveristetet: a non-profit organisation that supports life-long learning through lectures and workshops for people over 60.

With some 600 registered participants, the lecture “Artificiell Intelligens: från science fiction till verklighet” (“AI: from science fiction to reality”) held in Immanuelskyrkans hall, was so popular that the organisation asked me to hold the presentation twice! What a fantastic honour!

The third mission (reaching out to the general) is often one of the hardest components of a successful academic career as much of the work we do is too specific for the public. Finding good venues and channels in which it is possible to spread information, knowledge and research results is, therefore, often very difficult for us academics. Thus, I am truly very grateful to have been invited to speak to such a large group of people with so much knowledge and engagement with the topic of the talk.

Humbling!

Truly happy and very proud to announce that the master thesis work by Jorge Aguirregomezcorta Aina which I supervised has been accepted in a shorter version at the Seventh Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT2024), held in Madrid later this year.

The paper is called “Twist and Snap: A Neuro-symbolic System for Affordance Learning of Opening Jars and Bottles” and is written by Jorge Aguirregomezcorta Aina and Maria M. Hedblom

ISD8: Bozen-Bolzano, November 25-28th

The Image Schema Day workshop series has run for 7 editions and we are happy to announce that the workshop will run for an eighth time. This time as part of the workshop program at the 23rd conference of the Italian Association of Artificial Intelligence.

Submission deadline: 1st of September

More information on: https://isd8.imageschema.net/

Join us!

I am happy to announce that the paper “Revising Defeasible Theories via Instructions” written by Mihai Pomarlan, Laura Spillner Maria M. Hedblom and Robert Porzel, has made it into the Declarative AI conference RuleML+RR.

After a long journey and a lot of hard work, the manuscript on the research on designing and introducing a formally-founded visualisation language to represent image-schematic relations and events has been accepted for publication.

The article “The Diagrammatic Image Schema Language” authored by Maria M. Hedblom, Fabian Neuhaus and Till Mossakowski, will be published in an upcoming edition of the journal Spatial Cognition and Computation.