INTRODUCTION

From May 28-29 2020, the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) organizes a new SIKS-course “Social Artificial Intelligence”. 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 SIKS-PhD-students, other participants are not excluded. However, their number of passes will be restricted and depends on the number of SIKS-PhD -students taking the course.

The course is relevant for and recommended to all SIKS-Ph.D.-students working in Artificial Intelligence and related fields such as Responsible and Explainable AI. Especially these Ph.D.-students are strongly encouraged to participate.

Social AI aims to develop AI systems that have the ability to engage in natural social interaction with human beings. It is a multi-disciplinary field combining insights from social psychology and artificial intelligence to improve and design effective interactive technology. This includes, among others, social robots, virtual humans and conversational agents. From a technical perspective, social AI aims to develop new algorithms to endow social AI systems with more human-like abilities to understand and generate social behaviour (e.g., using techniques such as emotion recognition and natural language processing). From a social psychology perspective, social AI studies the psychological effects of interacting with social AI systems on people’s perceptions and behavior. From an applied perspective, social AI systems can be used for various practical purposes such as social skills training and behavior change.

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 is organised in two parts. On the first day, a more theoretical perspective is provided on social psychology and interactive technologies. On the second day, a more practical, design-oriented perspective is provided. The course is relevant for and recommended to SIKS PhD students working on social AI, including students with a focus on interaction technology, multi-modal signal processing, and/or user-centered design.

LOCATION: Mitland Hotel , Utrecht

DATE: 28-29 May 2020

SCIENTIFIC DIRECTORS:

• Prof. dr. Tibor Bosse (RUN)
• Prof. dr. Koen Hindriks (VUA)

PROGRAM: The program will be announced shortly

REGISTRATION
In the conference center there is a limited number of places and there is interest from other groups in the topic as well. Therefore, an early registration is required.

Deadline for registration for SIKS-Ph.D.-students: May 01 2020