[TMP-061] HAI Net International Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Cognitive enhancement of Human-centred AI (UbiCHAI)
A workshop to connect AI, cognitive science, and human augmentation communities
The main goal of the Humane AI Net project is to create a network of AI research within Europe. Following the success of the UbiCHAI tutorial at the Ubicomp Conference, which garnered unexpected attention, a follow-up workshop would help strengthen international connections. A fitting conference for this workshop is the Augmented Humans conference, a young and vibrant community with a similar focus to Humane AI Net. The Augmented Humans conference aims to enhance human capabilities through digital technologies, aligning with Humane AI Net’s focus on augmenting humans cognitively, socially, and perceptually.
Both communities share goals of advancing human augmentation, making the Augmented Humans conference an ideal venue for a workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Cognitive Enhancement of Human-centred AI (UbiCHAI). This full-day workshop will connect researchers working on Hybrid-Human-AI, cognitive and social sciences, and human augmentation. It will serve as a platform for presenting research and developing new ideas in areas such as cognitive perception of AI, social behavior, health and mental care, education, digitalization, and economics.
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
- 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
- Workshop in MobileHCI’24 in Melbourne, Australia http://ai-enhanced-cognition.com/mobichai/ https://mobilehci.acm.org/2024/acceptedworkshops.php
Partners
- DFKI, Agnes Gruenerbl, Passant Elagroudy, and Paul Lukowicz
- RPTU Landau, Thomas Lachmann and Jan Spilski
- Keio University, Giulia Barbareschi and Kai Kunze