Trust requires Social Intelligence

Keynote by Wendy Ju at the 4th TAILOR conference

Wendy Ju, associated professor at Cornell University, will give a keynote lecture at the opening session of the 4th TAILOR conference “Trustworthy AI from Lab to market”, 4-5 June 2024, Lisbon. Her talk will be about interaction intelligence.

Abstract

In everyday human interaction, people monitor each other to see if others understand their meaning, and they stop and self-correct if they recognize that they have made an error. This meta-ability to leverage the social signals in interaction is foundational to trust; automated systems will not have robust trust from human interactors without it. As intelligent systems such as autonomous cars or delivery robots increasingly permeate our lives, it becomes important to think about these machines might recognize and recover from errors in the way that people expect. I present recent work from my research group which considers how interaction intelligence can be as important as task intelligence for robots working around people.

Biography

Wendy Ju is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. She is also an inaugural faculty member of Cornell’s new campus-wide multidisciplinary Design Tech department, and an Associate Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion. Her work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Her current research focus is on everyday urban interaction. Professor Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.