Two research papers co-authored by EMAI Director, Professor Vicenç Gómez, have been accepted to major international conferences, highlighting ongoing contributions to both the foundations and the societal impacts of artificial intelligence.

The first paper, “From Next Token Prediction to (STRIPS) World Models,” has been accepted to the 23rd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2026). The work explores how transformer-based language models can give rise to structured world models for classical planning, bridging language modeling, planning, and knowledge representation.

The second paper, “Rewarding Engagement and Personalization in Popularity-Based Rankings Amplifies Extremism and Polarization,” has been accepted to the Research Track of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). The study investigates how engagement- and personalization-driven ranking systems can contribute to extremism and political polarization through computational modeling, simulations, and controlled experiments with human participants.

Together, these two publications reflect the depth of current AI research, spanning both the theoretical foundations of intelligent systems and the consequences of algorithmic decision-making.