Sergei Kalinin, Weston Fulton Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Tickle College of Engineering, has received a 2026 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award. One of the SEC’s highest honors, the award recognizes excellence in teaching, research and service.

Games are often called the ‘Formula 1’ of AI: clear rules, clear winners. AlphaZero-style algorithms learn by self-play: a neural network predicts moves and guides tree search. We tested this recipe on Nim, a simple children’s matchstick game that has been mathematically solved. Because the correct move is known for every position, we can measure whether an agent plays optimally across the state space. We find a gap: learning can work on small boards, but blind spots remain and performance degrades as the board grows, with predictions approaching random. This suggests impartial games often need analytic representations, not pattern learning.

By incorporating insights from canine companions, researchers enable robots to use both language and gesture as inputs to help fetch the right objects.

An international AI weather competition that sees teams from all over the world compete to produce the most accurate three to four-week weather forecasts has unveiled its latest results (13 March 2026).  

MLIP calculations successfully identify suitable dopants for a novel photocatalytic material, report researchers from Institute of Science Tokyo. As demonstrated in their latest study, a materials informatics approach could predict which ions can be stably introduced into orthorhombic Sn₃O₄, a promising and recently discovered photocatalytic tin oxide. Their experiments revealed that aluminum-doped samples achieved 16 times greater hydrogen production than the undoped material, paving the way for next-generation clean energy applications.

An artificial intelligence-based projection makeup system from Science Tokyo lets users describe a mood or style in their own words and instantly see matching makeup colors on their faces. The technology learns each person’s preferences in real time and displays results under realistic lighting that reflects individual skin tone and texture, making it more true to life than traditional virtual makeup apps that project effects onto two-dimensional displays.

A new study from Peking Union Medical College Hospital finds that robot-assisted cerebral angiography using China’s YDHB-NS01 system achieved a 100% success rate and significantly shorter procedure times than manual methods, without increasing radiation exposure, contrast use, or complications. This prospective study provides real-world clinical validation and highlights the potential of robotic systems to reduce occupational radiation risks in neurointerventional surgery.