UCLIC Seminar, 10 January 2024. Susanne Boll

Recording of UCLIC Research Seminar of Susanne Boll, University of Oldenburg and OFFIS - Institute for Information Technology.
Title: Prosocial Embedded AI: Artificial Intelligence in a Prosocial Interaction with Humans.
Abstract: AI-based technologies have and will become an integral part of everyday life, shaping the way we communicate, work, learn and interact with others. Information and decisions provided by an AI based on machine learning will be embedded in everyday interactive systems. While we see research explaining learned decisions to experts, we still need to understand how to explain them to everyday users. The people who use and are affected by AI are mostly not experts in AI, but everyday people in their professional and private lives. Moreover, 'AI' does not appear as a single entity in a digital system, but is embedded in larger complex environments that are part of our daily lives.
As interactive, AI-based systems replace humans or represent human decisions, the question arises as to how social or even prosocial the explanation and interaction with the AI should be. What do people expect from an interaction that acts autonomously in a social context? How much common understanding of the decision is needed to share the decision? How can explanations support social interaction? In this talk, I will present research results from social interactions with self-driving cars and interactions with AI-based self-service kiosks as examples of the way forward for socially embedded AI.
Bio: Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll is Professor of Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the OFFIS Institute for Information Technology in Oldenburg. Prof. Dr. Boll received her doctorate with distinction from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. She received her Diploma in Computer Science with distinction from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1996.
Her research area is at the intersection of human-computer interaction and interactive multimedia, where she has an excellent scientific track record. Her scientific results have been published in competitive, peer-reviewed international conferences such as Multimedia, CHI, as well as in internationally renowned journals. She is a very active member of the scientific community; she has been a reviewer for many international conferences and journals, and has co-organised and co-chaired many scientific events in the field.
Her research passion is the development of interactive technology for people, combining novel innovative technology development with user needs and social acceptance at the centre of her research. She develops novel interaction technologies that are designed for a respectful and beneficial cooperation between humans and technology in a future more and more automated world. Her scientific research projects have a strong connection to the societal challenge of interacting with automation and AI in the application areas of automated driving, interactive healthcare technologies, Industry 4.0 and public administration.