All keynotes are in Room A
Wednesday Keynote by Ana Paiva
Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
Engineering Social Capabilities in Human-Centered AI
This talk is sponsored by EurAI
Social agents, chatbots or social robots have the potential to change the way we interact with technology. As they become more affordable, they will have increased involvement in our daily activities with the ability to perform a wide range of tasks, communicate naturally with us, and thus, partner with humans socially and collaboratively. But how do we engineer social capabilities in our AI systems? How do we guarantee that these agents are trustworthy? To investigate these ideas we must seek inspiration in what it means to be social and build the technology to support hybrid teams of humans and AI.
In this talk, I will discuss how to engineer social capabilities in agents and illustrate it with some case studies, discussing the challenges, recent results, and the future directions for the field of social AI.
Bio
Prof. Ana Paiva is a Professor of Computer Science at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon investigating the creation of intelligent interactive systems by designing “social agents” that can interact with humans in a natural and social manner. She is also a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Over the years she has addressed this problem by engineering social agents that try to exhibit specific social capabilities, including non-verbal behavior, empathy, personality, culture adaptation, and collaboration, among others. Her more recent research combines methods from artificial intelligence with social modelling to study hybrid societies of humans and machines. In particular she is investigating how to engineer agents that lead to more prosocial and altruistic societies.
She has published extensively and received best paper awards in several conferences, notably, she won the Blue Sky Awards at the AAAI in 2018. She has further advanced the area of artificial intelligence and social agents worldwide, having served for the Global Agenda Council in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics of the World Economic Forum and as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Science Europe. She is a AAAI and a EurAI fellow.
Thursday Keynote by Frank van Harmelen
Computer Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Hybrid Intelligence: from a vision to a scientific discipline
Frank van Harmelen is a professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the Computer Science department (Faculty of Science) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. After studying mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam, he moved to the Department of AI in Edinburgh, where he was awarded a PhD in 1989 for his research on meta-level reasoning. While in Edinburgh, he co-developed a logic-based toolkit for expert systems, and worked with Prof. Alan Bundy on proof planning for inductive theorem proving. After his PhD research, he moved back to Amsterdam where he worked from 1990 to 1995 in the SWI Department under Prof. Wielinga, on the use of reflection in expert systems, and on the formal underpinnings of the CommonKADS methodology for Knowledge-Based Systems. In 1995 he joined the AI research group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he now leads the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group.
Friday Keynote by Yvonne Rogers
UCL Interaction Centre, University College London
How can HCI meet AI in the I?
November 2022 is a time we won’t forget. It was when OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world to much fanfare. Within weeks millions of people had tried it out and been surprised and shocked at what it could do – write essays, summarise key points, generate clever poems, code impressively, create out of this world images and so on. Since then, reams and reams has been written, by all manner of people, about how generative AI will change society irrevocably – for better or worse. In my talk, I take a different tack – which is to consider whether and how this new paradigm of computing can make humans think differently and do more. I ask how framing AI as hybrid human AI – from a human-computer interaction perspective – can extend beyond the current ‘prompting box’ approach by integrating other kinds of interactions at the interface that will empower and engage people in new ways.
Bio
Yvonne Rogers is the director of the Interaction Centre at UCL (UCLIC), deputy head of department for Computer Science and a Professor of Interaction Design. Her research is in the areas of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and interaction design. Her current research focuses on how human behaviour is being impacted and augmented through the design and adoption of new technologies. She is particularly interested in how human-centred applications of AI can be developed that benefit society. Central to her work is a critical stance towards how visions, theories and frameworks shape the fields of HCI, cognitive science and ubiquitous computing. She been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in the wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., “Being Human” manifesto) and has pioneered an approach to innovation and ubiquitous learning. In 2022 she was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Research Award and was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society. Other awards include the Royal Society Robin Milner Medal (2022) and a MRC Suffrage and Science Award (2020) for being one of the leading women in ‘mathematics & computing’. She was also awarded a chair of excellence from the University of Bremen (2020-2024). She is also CTO of the start up company LetsThink.com