Stephen M. Fiore (University of Central Florida), “Studying artificial social intelligence: Understanding and examining social cognitive processes in human-machine collaborations”

In this presentation Stephen M. Fiore will provide an overview of a body of research in social cognition and its relation to developing artificial social intelligence. In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), an important research direction is the development of systems that can work alongside and collaborate with humans as actual teammates. Effective teamwork is crucial in fields that have high-stakes and can require complex collaborative problem solving (e.g., disaster response). In these environments, the ability of team members to collaborate requires social-cognitive processes over and above an understanding of the tasks to be accomplished. We address this through the study of socially intelligent AI and how these influence interactions with human counterparts acting as a team. In this talk, Stephen Fiore will first provide an overview of our approach to social cognition and the theoretical concepts being studied. He will describe theory and data from his various research projects studying human-human and human-machine teaming and conclude with recommendations and guidance for future research on artificial social intelligence.

This course This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott