Social AI Tutorial

Alessandro Vinciarelli (http://vinciarelli.net) is Full Professor at the University of Glasgow where he is Director and Principal Investigator of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents (http://socialcdt.org), a project training 70+ PhD students in all aspects of Social AI. In addition, Alessandro is member of Responsible AI (http://rai.ac.uk), the UK initiative aimed at ensuring the respect of ethics in AI, through the keystone project “Participatory Harm Auditing Workbenches and Methodologies” (http://phawm.org). His main research interest is Social Signal Processing, the domain aimed at modelling, analysis and synthesis of nonverbal communication in human-human and human-machine interactions. Overall, Alessandro published more than 200 scientific works (including 50+ journal papers) that attracted over 11,000 citations on Google Scholar (h-index 47). Furthermore, he garnered 14.5 MEuros as a Principal Investigator in competitive calls funded by national and international research agencies (European Union Programs, United Kingdom Research and Innovation, Swiss National Science Foundation, etc.). Last, but not least, Alessandro is co-founder of Klewel (http://klewel.com), a knowledge management company recognized as an exemplary impact story by IEEE Multimedia, and Scientific Advisor of Substrata (http://substrata.me), the social signal intelligence platform for dealmakers and sales professionals. Besides the organizer (Vinciarelli), the course will involve two other academics: Dr Tanaya Guha (http://www.tanayag.com) and Dr Mathieu Chollet (https://matchollet.github.io).

Tanaya Guha is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, where she is a founding member of the Social AI group with Alessandro Vinciarelli and Mathieu Chollet. She holds a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. Her current research focuses on developing AI capabilities to understand human behaviour combining deep learning, computer vision, and signal/speech Processing. She has published over 70 research articles, mostly in leading venues. She is a Senior Member of IEEE, an elected member of IEEE MMSP Technical Committee, and serves(d) in the Editorial Board of several journals including IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) and Scientific Reports. She is/was a Program Chair for BMVC2024 and ACM ICMI2025.

Mathieu Chollet is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, where lo coordinates the Social AI Group with Alessandro Vinciarelli and Tanaya Guha. He is also associate external researcher to the LS2N-PACCE research group, IMT Atlantique, Nantes, France. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Telecom Paristech, Paris, France. His research interests include social behaviour planning for virtual agents, multimodal social signal processing for user and team modelling, and the evaluation of human-computer interaction applications leveraging human-agent social interactions. He is Treasurer of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing journal, and was general chair for the ACM IVA 2024 conference.