INTRODUCTION

On 5 and 6 November 2026, the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) and Hybrid Intelligence are organising the course “Social Artificial Intelligence: Recent Trends in Social Interactions with Conversational Agents”. The course will be given in English and is part of the Educational Program for SIKS PhD students. Although these courses are primarily intended for PhD students registered with SIKS, other participants will not be excluded. However, their number of passes will be restricted and will depend on the number of SIKS PhD students taking the course.

Social AI addresses the study of AI systems that have the ability to engage in natural social interaction with human beings. It is a multi-disciplinary field combining insights from artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and social psychology to design and evaluate effective interactive technology. This includes, e.g., social robots, virtual humans and conversational agents. The current edition of the Social AI course focuses specifically on social interactions with conversational agents.

The rapid developments in Natural Language Processing and Generative AI have resulted in the wide-scale adoption of conversational agents (or chatbots). Worldwide, millions of users are interacting with conversational agents on a daily basis, for different purposes varying from information seeking to (mental) health support. In this course, we discuss the state-of-the-art of human-agent interactions from various perspectives, including a technical (how do these systems work?), psychological (what are the effects on people?), societal (what are the broader implications?) and ethical (how desirable is all this?) perspective.

Each of these themes will be explained in lectures with a focus on various aspects related to these themes, presented by researchers in the field. The course will include theoretical lectures on social psychology and interactive technologies as well as more practical, hands-on lectures on chatbot development. The course is relevant for and recommended to SIKS (and other) PhD students working on social AI, including students with a focus on interaction technology, natural language processing, and/or user-centered design.

DATES:

Thursday 5 & Friday 6 November 2026

LOCATION:

The course will take place at hotel Landgoed Huize Bergen in Vught, near Den Bosch. Please note that overnight accommodation is not provided for this course. Should you wish to stay at Landgoed Huize Bergen, you will be able to book a room at a discount by contacting them on +31 73 658 04 00 or receptie@huizebergen.nl and informing them you are a SIKS PhD student.

SCIENTIFIC DIRECTORS:

Prof. dr. Tibor Bosse, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Prof. dr. Koen Hindriks, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

REGISTRATION

Registration for this course is now open. If you have any questions, please email Renée.