Researcher & teacher. TAIGA co-director
Primary focus: Anxiety-Sensitive Artificial Intelligence
General interests: simulation, responsible AI, pedagogy and transdisciplinarity
I am fascinated by the philosophical question of understanding what is intelligence, which I explore under the spectrum of artificial intelligence: how can one create features of intelligence in artificial systems? What does it say about the concept of intelligence?
As a practical implementation of this interest, most of my research revolved on producing accurate models of cognitive systems as we know them from psychology: cultures, values, norms, needs, networks, planning, cognitive workload etc. My recent research effort has been dedicated to develop the concept of AnxSAI (Anxiety-Sensitive Artificial Intelligence), i.e. systems that can replicate or account for (human) anxiety --both directly through my research, but also by gathering stakeholders, researchers and students around this question through discussions, events, and projects. If AI for anxiety is of your interest, please feel invited to contact me: I will gladly discuss the matter around a coffee.
I have been applying this knowledge for building social simulations (e.g. for helping policy-makers to mitigate the COVID crisis), and problem-solving (e.g. generating itineraries that can minimize user's anxiety). Whereas I have a solid computing-science background (and admitedly like to program), my scientific methods are fundamentally interdisciplinary, with a particular emphasis on establishing my models in strong psychology and sociology grounds. Half of my students arise from cognitive sciences and psychology and I have the honor to be a co-director of TAIGA, Umeå's transdisciplinary center on AI for Good, leading the Social AI focus area.
Beside this direct scientific interest, I have a strong interest on practical AI for social good applications. In addition to extensive implementation experience on social simulation (e.g. ASSOCC project), multiagent systems, robotics, and planning, both in industry and academia, I have been developping vision-broadening pedagogy methods (psychology-grounded AI ethics pedagogy, interdisciplinary research pedagogy) and have been studying the prospects of future AI-powered technologies on the fishing and energy-management sectors.
Affiliate member of the CRAFT Research Lab