About
The Social AI CDT is one of 16 Artificial Intelligence CDTs that were funded by UKRI in 2018 following a highly competitive selection process.
It is the only CDT dedicated to Social AI, the domain aimed at making machines socially intelligent, enabling them to effectively interpret and respond to users’ intentions, feelings, personalities, emotions, attitudes, and more.
To achieve this, the CDT has adopted an interdisciplinary training approach. Every PhD project is co-created and co-supervised either by two academics, one from a technological (computing science and engineering), the other from a human sciences background (psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, etc.) or by an academic and an industrial partner, thus bridging the gap between technology and its users.
By the end of the CDT’s first phase (2019–2023), the Centre accomplished the following key successes:
A total of 42 academics of the University of Glasgow, including 13 that are included in the top 2% of the most cited researcher list elaborated by the University of Stanford, have joined the CDT’s supervisory network
A total of 16 industrial partners and two training organisations have agreed to collaborate with the CDT. To see who they are, click here
Academic supervisors and industrial partners have co-created 68 interdisciplinary projects, all based on the cross-pollination between technology and human sciences, covering every aspect of Social AI. To see the 46 projects that have been assigned to our students, click here
Between 2019 and 2023, the CDT attracted 480 applicants, selecting 46 students over five recruitment campaigns to join the Centre. In 2023, during the CDT’s final round of recruitment, the Centre had a record 135 candidates apply
Rigorous statistical analyses demonstrated that the recruiting process had no biases on the main Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) dimensions of gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnic origin and disability
All CDT students successfully passed their exams during the first year of the Centre’s PhD programme, Computing Science and Psychology with Integrated Study. The programme included standard Master’s level courses taught both in the School of Computing Science and the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow
CDT Academics and industrial partners have co-organised, in Glasgow, five international conferences, including the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, The European Conference on Information Retrieval, the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications, and the IEEE International Conference ICSDS
The CDT has (co-)organised and contributed to 70+ events totalling 300+ hours of training for our students and others. To view a selection of our events, click here
As the CDT has grown as a centre of excellence for postgraduate training, we have invited other University of Glasgow PhD students undertaking related research, to join the CDT as Aligned Students. To date, we have 17 Aligned Students