Does AI Spell the End of Social Interaction? – Lecture by Dr. Justine Cassell

  • Sept. 6, 2019, 8:00 pm US/Central
  • Fermilab Ramsey Auditorium
  • Dr. Justine Cassell, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Tickets: $8
  • Purchase tickets »

Tickets now available!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has implications for almost every aspect of our lives.The fears that it has evoked, however, sometimes seem to outweigh the possibilities. Fears about the future of work and of social interaction seem to weigh most heavily upon us.  Much of what we have seen in AI until now, though, has been built based on data about humans at work (or at least carrying out tasks of one sort or another), and has ignored key aspects of the social interactions that happen before, during, and after those tasks we carry out with others. In this talk Dr. Cassell will describe some unexpected results about the ways in which social interaction can support and improve task performance in people, and how social interaction can profitably be integrated into AI, with implications for the future of AI, the future of work, and the future of social interaction.

Justine Cassell is Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Impact in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Director Emerita of the Human Computer Interaction Institute. She co-directs the Yahoo-CMU InMind partnership on the future of personal assistants, and was a founding co-director of the Simon Initiative on Technology-Enhanced Learning. Previously Cassell was faculty at Northwestern University where she founded the Technology and Social Behavior Doctoral Program and Research Center. Before that she was a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab. Cassell has received the MIT Edgerton Prize, and Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award, in 2011 was named to the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on AI and Robotics, which she chaired for 2 years before moving to chair the World Economic Future Council on the Future of Computing. In 2012 Cassell was named a AAAS fellow, in 2016 made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Scotland, and in 2017 made a Fellow of the ACM. In 2017-2018 Cassell held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris, where she was a visiting researcher at the Sorbonne. Cassell has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos for the past 8 years on topics concerning the impact of AI and Robotics on society.