This image shows a pixelated room, it looks like a typical bedroom or office. Most of it is heavily pixelated, but a shelf, table and plant, windows and clock can be recognised. These are all outlined in yellow boxes.

AAAI presidential panel – factuality and trustworthiness

/ AAAI, AAAI2026, ai, AI (Artificial Intelligence), Artificial Intelligence, Education, quick read / By

Elise Racine / Morning View / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
The Future of AI Research report, published in March 2025, aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. The report was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi and covers 17 different AI topics. Members of the report team, and other selected AI practitioners, are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report.
In the sixth discussion in the collection, the three panellists tackle factuality and trustworthiness. Specifically, they cover the following topics:

Understanding factuality: why preventing false outputs from large language models remains AI’s toughest problem
Beyond accuracy: how trustworthiness encompasses understandability, robustness, and human values—essential for deploying AI in high-stakes environments
Practical solutions: explore proven approaches including fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, output verification, and model simplification strategies

Panel Members

Oren Etzioni, TrueMedia.org, University of Washington
Henry Kautz, University of Virginia at Charlottesville
Kush R Varshney, IBM Fellow

Moderator

Francesca Rossi, AAAI past president, IBM Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader