2025 Workshop on Awareness in Learning Agents (ALA)

This workshop is hosted by the 2025 ECAI Conference - 25-30 October 2025, Bologna, Italy

We focus on the transformative potential of Awareness as a conceptual and methodological tool in the design of learning-based systems and synthetic agents. While machine learning has achieved remarkable success in solving specialized predictive and generative tasks over a broad application landscape, awareness can elevate these systems to new levels of understanding, decision-making, and interaction. This workshop will explore how integrating awareness into learning agents can fundamentally reshape their capabilities, enabling them to operate with greater efficacy, efficiency, reliability, and trustworthiness.

Awareness in this context refers to the intrinsic ability of systems to reach and share an understanding of their environment, context, and objectives in a way that extends beyond raw data processing or task-specific optimization. By incorporating elements such as situational comprehension, self-reflection, temporal and agentive understanding, awareness has the potential to address many of the current limitations in AI, including brittleness, lack of transparency, and limited interoperability when operating in collective of agents, whether purely synthetic or in human-AI collaborations.

The workshop explores both the technical advancements provided by awareness and the philosophical, ethical, and societal impacts and implications of aware agents. It provides a forum for discussion between different research communities, including artificial intelligence, robotics, philosophy, and social sciences. Through keynote talks, contributed sessions, and an interactive panel discussion, participants will explore diverse perspectives, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. This dual focus on technical advancement and societal impact aims to inspire not only the development of more capable learning agents but also a thoughtful approach to their integration into the world. By addressing these interconnected dimensions, the workshop seeks to ensure that advancements in awareness contribute positively to both technology and society.

The workshop is framed within the context of the “Awareness Inside” portfolio, a recent initiative launched by the European Innovation Council (EIC) funding 8 Pathfinder collaborative projects investigating awareness and consciousness as actionable design concepts for artificial agents.