Welcome to the home page of SOCIAL, the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents. The overarching goal of SOCIAL is to train the next generation of experts in Artificial Social Intelligence, the AI domain aimed at endowing artificial agents with social intelligence, the ability to deal appropriately with users’ attitudes intentions, feelings, personality and expectations.

The training program covers the following main areas:

• To outline principles and laws that govern social interactions between human and artificial agents – both embodied and virtual – at the level of cognitive, behavioural and physiological phenomena;
• To develop technological approaches – informed by the principles and laws outlined above – that allow artificial agents to act as believable and effective partners in social interactions involving human users;
• To improve the impact of artificial agents through their integration into wider and more complex technological systems and infrastructures;
• To investigate the human response to socially intelligent artificial agents in everyday life.

SOCIAL is based at the University of Glasgow and it is a collaboration between the School of Computing Science, the School of Psychology, the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, the Adam Smith Business School, the School of Critical Studies, the School of Engineering, the Scottish Graduate School of the Social Sciences and 16 industrial partners (BRAIQ, Context-Scout, Dimensional Imaging, Dyson, FLASH Robotics, Furhat Robotics, Micro-phonics, Microsoft, Neurodata-Lab, PolyAI, Qumodo, Rakuten, Schumberger, SICSA, Telefonica, The Data Lab).

For any inquiry, please contact us at social-cdt@glasgow.ac.uk.