Professor Alessandro Vinciarelli he/him

My activity focuses Social AI and Social Signal Processing, the two AI domains aimed at making machines socially intelligent, i.e. capable to make sense of social interactions in the same way as humans do.

This means to work on:

• automatic detection of the physical, machine detectable traces that social and psychological phenomena leave in observable human behaviour, and
• on automatic interpretation of such traces.

For example, a smile can be the physical trace of happiness and, as such, it can be automatically detected. In turn, a detected smile can be interpreted as an evidence of happiness, courtesy, etc.

My PhD projects involve Computer Science (especially signal processing and Artificial Intelligence) and Social Psychology. They typically revolve around a problem of psychological interest (e.g., the perception of personality, the detection of mental health issues, the analysis of conflict, etc.) that can be addressed through the development of AI approaches (e.g., Deep Networks, Statistical Sequential Models, etc.).

My work is about people as much as it is about machines and this is the unique interdisciplinary characteristic of my group.

Overall, I supervised around 25 PhD students that are now active in both academia (National University of South Wales, University of Sheffield, etc.) and industry (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.). Most of them still work in the area of their PhD project. In addition, I direct a UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training that attracted 480 candidates over the last 5 years and was demonstrated to be bias-free in terms of gender, ethnic origin, disability, sexual orientation and age. I am still enthusiastic at my work and I meet all my PhD students at least once a week. Progressing every day is the secret behind a successful PhD project and I am there to ensure that all my students do it.