[TMP-061] HAI Net International Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Cognitive enhancement of Human-centred AI (UbiCHAI)

Contact person: Agnes Grünerbl (agnes.gruenerbl@dfki.de) 

Internal Partners:

1. DFKI, Agnes Gruenerbl, Passant Elagroudy, and Paul Lukowicz  

External Partners:

1. RPTU Landau, Thomas Lachmann and Jan Spilski
2. Keio University, Giulia Barbareschi and Kai Kunze  

The main goal of the Humane AI Net project is to build up a network of AI research mainly within Europe. Nevertheless, since the recent UbiCHAI – experimental methodologies for cognitive human augmentation -Tutorial held at the Ubicomp Conference and co-sponsored by the HAI Net project, received great feedback and drew the attention of more attendees than initially expected, a follow-up Workshop would help to strengthen and extend the international connections HAI Net could build during this Ubicomp Tutorial.

A possible Conference that would fit nicely to both, the scope of the UbiCHAI Tutorial as well as the broad range of HAI Net, is the Augmented Humans conference.

The Augmented Humans community is also a rather young but vibrant community and has been around constantly for 10 years. With their goal to augment humans, Augmented Humans have a similar focus as the Humane AI Net community. As stated on their website: “The conference focuses on physical, cognitive, and perceptual augmentation of humans through digital technologies. The plural – humans – emphasizes the move towards technologies that enhance human capabilities beyond the individual and will have the potential for impact on a societal scale. The idea of augmenting the human intellect has a long tradition, the term was coined by Douglas Engelbart in 1962. Today, many of the technologies envisioned by Engelbart and others are commonplace, and looking towards the future, many technologies which amplify the human body and mind far beyond the original vision are within reach.”

The joint goals of Humane AI Net and Augmented Humans, of social, cognitive, and perceptual augmentation of the human, seem perfect to host a HAI Net International Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Cognitive enhancement of Human-centred AI (UbiCHAI) at the Augmented Humans conference, to connect both communities.

We aim for a full-day workshop connecting researchers in the different aspects of Hybrid-Human-AI with Cognitive and Social Science to Augment the Human and provide a platform where research can be presented and new ideas can be developed in the scope of Cognitive perception of AI over into the fields of social behavior, health- and mental care, subject didactics, digitalization, economy, and others.

Results Summary

This workshop was a collaboration with the Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at the RPTU Kaiserslautern, and the Media Design, Keio University, Japan. After initial rejection from the Augmented Humans conference, we submitted the idea to this Workshop to the MobileHCI conference, which was hosted in Melbourne, Australia as well this year. One of the reasons to host this workshop in Australia was to build up connections for the Human AI Net network to Australia as well (after hosting events in Mexico and Japan). The workshop was quite successful and gained a lot of interest from the attendants of the conference including the local chairs and organizers of the conference attending the workshop. Thus our workshop turned into the largest workshop at the MobileHCI conference by far (25+ attendees). A highlight of the Workshop itself was that we could win Prof. Thad Starner from Georgia Tech as a Key-Note Speaker and attendee. The workshop theme was to look at methods to: sense, simulate, influence, and evaluate cognitive functions using Human-Centered AI. Cognitive functions refer to perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making. We had 8 paper submissions to the workshop and as a follow up to the work done in the workshop, one of the organizers (Passant Elagroudy) was invited to attend a Dagstuhl seminar in 2025 about cognitive augmentation.

Tangible Outcomes

1. Passant Elagroudy, Agnes Grünerbl, Giulia Barbareschi, Jan Spilski, Kai Kunze, Thomas Lachmann, Paul Lukowicz: mobiCHAI – 1st International Workshop on Mobile Cognition-Altering Technologies (CAT) using Human-Centered AI. MobileHCI (Companion) 2024: 31:1-31:5 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3640471.3680462 
2. Workshop in MobileHCI’24 in Melbourne, Australia http://ai-enhanced-cognition.com/mobichai/ https://mobilehci.acm.org/2024/acceptedworkshops.php