Title: An Introduction to Social AI
Abstract: The presentation introduces Social AI, the domain aimed at modelling, analysis and synthesis of human-human and human-machine interactions. After outlining the scope of the field (what Social AI is about and what are its most important scientific objectives), the presentation will cover its most distinctive aspects. Special attention will be paid to the interdisciplinary collaboration with Psychology and other Human Sciences because Social AI is about people as much as it is about machines. Finally, a few examples will provide a chance to develop familiarity with approaches, methodologies and research problems common to most Social AI works.
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Alessandro Vinciarelli (http://vinciarelli.net [vinciarelli.net]) is Full Professor at the University of Glasgow, where he is with the School of Computing Science and the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. His main research interest is Social AI, the domain aimed at modelling, analysis and synthesis of verbal and nonverbal behaviour in human-human and human-machine interactions. He published 200+ works in international journals and conferences and he is or has been Principal Investigator in 15+ projects, including an EU funded European Network of Excellence (the SSPNet, 2009-2014, 6.2MEuros) and the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents (2019-2027, 6MEuros, http://socialcdt.org [socialcdt.org]). Alessandro co-organized 30+ international events as General Chair (IEEE International Conference on Social Computing 2012, ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2017, International Conference on Digital mental Health and Wellbeing 2026, etc.), Program Chair (ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2023, Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction 2024) or other roles. In addition, Alessandro is co-founder of Klewel (http://klewel.com [klewel.com]), a knowledge management company recognised by the IEEE as an exemplary impact story, and scientific advisor to Substrata (http://substrata.me [substrata.me]), a leading Social Signal Processing company.