Attendees gather outside USC’s Ginsburg Human-Centered Computation Hall during NeuS and L4DC, two conferences exploring the future of intelligent systems.

Picture a Waymo stuck in a four-way standoff, unable to decide who goes first.

It’s a small glitch with a simple cause: the car’s AI is great at learning patterns, but less effective at reasoning through novel situations with any guarantee it will get them right.

That gap between systems that learn and systems we can actually trust is what brought hundreds of researchers to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Stevens School of Advanced Computing and AI this June for two conferences happening at once.

From June 16-19, researchers from around the world gathered at USC for the Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC) and the International Conference on Neuro-Symbolic Systems (NeuS), two events exploring different approaches to the same challenge.