I had the great opportunity to give a keynote talk at the 2nd International Workshop on Bridging Social Sciences and AI for Understanding Child Behaviour:

https://sites.google.com/view/wocbu/home

The event was organised, among others, by Heysem Kaya at the University of Utrecht and it addressed the development of interactive technologies for children. My keynote focused on detection and analysis of attachment in school-age children, a topic I addressed extensively in the last years. Another keynote was given by Sibel Halfon of Istanbul Bilgi University and covered the psychological aspects of children development. Overall, children appear to be users that need specific design attention when developing technology and cannot be considered through the same lens as adult users.

It was my great pleasure to be one of the Doctoral Consortium Chairs at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, in collaboration with Iolanda Leite:

https://icmi.acm.org/2021/index.php?id=cfdc

We received a large number of high quality submissions and we selected 8 articles covering all aspects of Multimodal Interaction, from the analysis of human behaviour, to social robotics, Human Computer Interaction and cognitive ergonomics. All participants did a great job in sharing their results and plans towards the completion of their PhD. All of this with the help of several tutors that added significant value to the event (Sean Andrist, Anna Esposito, Mohamed Khamis, Simone Stumpf, Marynel Vazquez) by sharing their insight and experience about the work of the participants. The event included a final panel aimed at discussing different aspects of a research career.

It was a great pleasure and honour to be keynote speaker at the Mexican Conference on Pattern Recognition:

The talk revolved around Social Signal Processing, the domain I have been working on for the last 15 years. It was a pity not to be in condition to travel to Mexico City, but it was still possible to have a nice exchange with he conference participants. There were a lot of interesting questions and it was a very good chance to meet a community I was not familiar with.

I participated in a roundtable organised by Copy House on Customer Centric AI:

The panel included people working in all types of role (CEOs, Business Development Managers, etc) so that the topic could be explored from all points of view. The main message is that AI is playing an increasingly more important role in the management of customer-business relationships.

I am very happy to participate in Book Week Scotland, the event organised by the Scottish Book Trust that involves readers and public libraries. I have been asked to prepare a short video about Artificial Intelligence that I entitled “AI: past, present and future”, where I have tried to explain what Artificial Intelligence is through a brief history of the domain.

The details of the initiative are available at the following link:

https://www.eastdunbarton.gov.uk/news/virtual-feast-offer-years-book-week-scotland

With my great pleasure, I have built the content of the video upon a few books that I have read in the last years and that have helped me to shape my very own ideas about AI and its development. I am looking forward to receive questions and comments from the audience, hoping that the video will one of help for the organisers of this important event.

The tutorial on Social AI organised in collaboration with Monika Harvey and Stacy Marsella has been a great success. Despite being held on a Saturday afternoon, the tutorial was attended by 50 persons that have participated with great questions and comments. The website of the tutorial is here:

The three presentations have covered the approaches aimed at the three main dimensions of a socially intelligent artificial agent, namely perception, cognition and action. The tutorial was organised in conjunction with Intelligent Virtual Agents, one of the main conferences on the synthesis of human behaviour.

We have published another paper about depression for Cognitive Computation:

N.Aloshban, A.Esposito and A.Vinciarelli, “What You Say Or How You Say It? Depression Detection Through Joint Modelling of Linguistic and Acoustic Aspects of Speech“, accepted for publication by Cognitive Computation, to appear 2020.

The key-point of the paper is that depression and control participants tend to. manifest their condition in different ways. In particular, while depressed individuals tend to show their pathology through nonverbal behaviour (how they speak), control ones tend to do it through their lexical choices (what they say). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such an observation has been made in the literature.

I had the great opportunity to participate in an event organised by APARA (Asia Pacific Robotics Association). I joined an online panel and discussion about responsible AI and ethics:

https://www.aibotics.tech/webinar

Together with researchers (Prof David Bodoff from Haifa University) and entrepreneurs (Olivia Gambelin from Ethical AI and Chuan Hiang from Interaktiv) we have discussed the role of ethics in AI. After our presentations, we had the great opportunity to participate in a radio show on Money FM with the moderation of Rachel Kelly. A recording of the event is available at the link above.

I have been given the opportunity to give a Distinguished Lecture at the Institute of Engineering and Management in India:

https://iem.edu.in/news-events/iem-uem-foreign-distinguished-lecture-by-prof-alessandro-vinciarelli-university-of-glasgow-uk-on-7th-september-2020/

I have introduced the general aspects of Social Signal Processing and Social AI, in particular when it comes to the analysis of nonverbal behaviour in human-human and human-machine interactions. I have used the analysis of conflict as a particular example of how AI-driven technologies can be used to understand social and psychological phenomena. The lecture was attended by roughly 300 people.

We got two full papers accepted at the next ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interactions:

• N.Aloshban, A.Esposito and A.Vinciarelli, “Detecting Depression in Less Than 10 Seconds: Impact of Speaking Time on Depression Detection Sensitivity“, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2020.
• D.B.Vo, S.Brewster and A.Vinciarelli, “Did the Children Behave? Investigating the Relationship Between Attachment Condition and Child Computer Interaction“, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2020.

Both articles revolve around mental health issues and, in particular, around the possibility to infer the mental conditions of people from their observable behaviour. In the case of depression, the approach takes into account what people say and how they say it. The focus is on the possibility to detect depression using only a few seconds of speech, something that it is important because depressed people find it difficult to speak for long time. In the case of attachment, the proposed approach analyses the way children use an interactive system and the results show that secure children tend to better interact with the design of the system, in line with the expectations of Attachment Theory.

It is a great pleasure to say that the publications have been obtained with the help of one of my most senior PhD students (Nujud Aloshban) and an experienced postdoctoral researchers with whom I have been collaborating for 5 years.