Alessandro Vinciarelli

I have been involved in a very interesting and engaging symposium at the European Conference on Personality Psychology, held in Edinburgh between July 20th and 24th:

https://www.ecp22edinburgh.org

The symposium has been organised by John Rauthmann, president of the European Association on Personality, and its goal was to consider personality psychology from all points of view. Besides me, contributing with the perspective of Computing Science and AI, the symposium involved two philosophers, Marie Kaiser and Uljana Feest.

Marie works on a conceptualization of personality psychology capable to encompass the study of personality in both human and non-human living beings, with a special focus on the way ethologists investigate animal personality (an amazing field of study). Uljana has shown that personality scientists produce an amazing amount of excellent work without sharing a formal definition of personality accepted and recognised by everybody. While not entirely formalized, the concept of personality seems to be understood enough to allow scientists to work on it.

The conference was a chance to meet Aidan Wright, a prominent personality psychologist with whom I had one of the nicest scholarly exchanges of my career: in 2014, he wrote for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing an article on the role of computing science in personality science (a commentary to a survey on personality computing I published on the same journal with Gelareh Mohammadi). I then wrote an article that answered his comments (always in collaboration with Gelareh Mohammadi) and the result was a nice spotlight.

Finally, it has been interesting to see how psychologists are applying their methods of inquiry to LLMs, in an attempt to see whether these new, disruptive technologies manifest something that we can call personality.