This event is part of the AI for Social Impact Seminar Series hosted by Penn State's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
“Behavior Change for Social Good Using AI”
Advances in technologies and interface design are enabling group activities of varying complexities to be carried out, in whole or in part, over the internet, with benefits to science and society (e.g., citizen science, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) and questions-and-answers sites). The need to support these highly diverse interactions brings new and significant challenges to AI, including how to provide incentives that keep participants motivated and productive; how to provide useful, information to system designers to help them decide whether and how to intervene with the group’s work; and how to evaluate the effects of AI interventions on the performance of individuals and the group. I will describe ongoing projects in my lab that address these challenges in two socially relevant settings – education and citizen science – and discuss potential ethical issues that arise from using AI for behavior change.
About the Speaker
Kobi Gal is an associate professor at the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Reader at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His work investigates representations and algorithms for making decisions in heterogeneous groups comprising both people and computational agents. He combines artificial intelligence algorithms with educational technology toward supporting students in their learning and teachers in their understanding how students learn. He has published widely in highly refereed venues on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the learning and the cognitive sciences.
Gal is the recipient of the Wolf foundation's 2013 Krill prize for young Israeli scientists, a Marie Curie International fellowship, and a three-time recipient of Harvard University's outstanding teacher award. In 2020 he was appointed a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He has received best paper awards at ACM Conference on User Modelling Adaptation and Personalization 2019 (UMAP-19), ACM conference on Economics and Computation 2016 (EC-16) and Educational Data Mining 2014 (EDM-14). He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT) and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence (JAIR). In 2017 he was elected as Chairperson of the Israeli Association for Artificial Intelligence.