Alessandro Vinciarelli

It was a great pleasure and honour to be keynote speaker at the Workshop on Formalization, Modellization, and Representation of Social Pattern Analyses (ForMoRe), organised by the Social Pattern Recognition Laboratory of the University of Trento:

https://webmagazine.unitn.it/evento/sociologia/116210/formore-workshop

The workshop Chairs (Chiara Bassetti and Stefano Borgo) attracted a large number of researchers working on a wide spectrum of fields (philosophy, sociology, Artificial Intelligence, Anthropology, Human Computer Interaction, etc.) with the goal of reflecting on interdisciplinary collaboration. Interdisciplinary is a recurring theme in the life of a researcher, all funding agencies and universities encourage different disciplines to come together and tackle greater challenges, but it is true that all research infrastructure, especially when it comes to publications and distribution of funding, is organised to reward monodisiplinary efforts. Not to mention that not all researchers are ready to leave their comfort zones and accept the challenges coming from other disciplines.

During my keynote, I shared my experience in organising large-scale interdisciplinary projects that involved computer scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists. In particular, I shared my road to interdisciplinary (the way I started to develop interdisciplinary interests) and the lessons I learned by being Principal of the Social Signal Processing Network (an FP7 funded European Network of Excellence) and the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents. I did my best to translate my experience in a series of actionable suggestions that I hope will be of help. Most importantly, I shared the negative feedback I received over the years. Interdisciplinary is not a walk of roses.