Social Machines

SIREN is pleased to host the event 'Social Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Learns to Understand People', organized within the framework of the 20th edition of the International Research Week (SIR 2026).

The tutorial is an introduction to the main aspects of Artificial Social Intelligence (Social AI), the AI domain aimed at making machines socially intelligent.

The focus will be on the most specific aspects of the field with respect to the rest of AI, including interdisciplinary connection with Human Sciences, methodological aspects of data collection, and Deep Learning methodologies for analysis and synthesis of human behavior.

Event Details & Logistics

Date Monday, October 12, 2026

Time & Schedule 9:00 AM Registration • 10:00 AM Start

Venue Società Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN)

Address Via Giuseppe Pellegrino, 19
84019 Vietri sul Mare (SA), Italy

Contact & References

For more details about the Glasgow Social AI Group and their research projects, you can visit their official channels:

Official Website LinkedIn Group

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Alessandro Vinciarelli

Professor of Computational Social Intelligence, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

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.

Prof. Tanaya Guha

Professor of Computer Science, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Tanaya Guha is a Professor of Computer Science 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.