“We are all positively or negatively biased towards certain people. It is a natural phenomenon. We cannot think of everything we do and say, and so automatic processes run in the background, and these are unconsciously biased. Artificial intelligence (AI) can detect these types of biases and show individuals (and society) where they have a negative model about certain types of person. AI can help us to mitigate the effects of these types of biases and reduce conflict.”

This is a conversation with Professor Alessandro Vinciarelli. Alessandro is a full Professor at the University of Glasgow. He’s with both the School of Computing Science and the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. His research interest is Social Signal Processing, the computing domain aimed at modelling, analysing and synthesizing non-verbal behaviour in human to machine interaction.

In this episode, Alessandro talks about his work to educate a new generation of AI practitioners that are endowing artificial agents with social intelligence; attitudes intentions, feelings, personality and expectations. We explored the capabilities and limitations at this time of emotion-creating/reading machines and the current use cases. I asked Alessandro what relationships between humans and machines will look like in the future.