SIKS Course Social AI

On 16 and 17 February 2023, NeFCA’s TWG Human-Machine Communication and the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) is organising the SIKS-course “Social Artificial Intelligence”.

The course is relevant for and recommended to all SIKS PhD students working in Artificial Intelligence and related fields such as Responsible and Explainable AI. Especially these PhD 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, e.g., 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 behaviour. From an applied perspective, social AI systems can be used for various practical purposes such as social skills training and behaviour changes.

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 be 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.

For enrollment see the course website here and see here for a preliminary program.