HHAI 2023

Last week (July 26-30), I attended the 2nd International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HHAI), taking place in Munich. The program included a number of interesting workshops, thought-provoking keynotes, insightful paper presentations and a few small social events. 

The keynotes.  Ana Paiva kicked off the conference with her keynote on Social Artificial Intelligence. She presented several use cases where human-like capabilities of AI agents are engineered and tested in a typical social setting (e.g., a two-team card game). Her talk gave an overview of recent works from AI to Social AI and Prosocial AI, existing challenges and future directions for the field.

Frank van Harmelen gave a keynote discussing the question of how the Hybrid Intelligence vision can be turned into a science. The talk did not provide concrete answers, instead it opened up a discussion about the future of Hybrid Intelligence (HI). Since HI is born from the intersection of (at least) 3 disciplines- Artificial Intelligence, Psychology and Human Computer Interaction (HCI), there is a need to merge these into a unified science. The keynote discussed how these fields differentiate and could potentially contribute to the assumptions, language, questions, methods, metrics and results that we need to agree on for marketing HI a science.  

Yvonne Rogers talked about how HCI and AI can meet at the I, I standing for Interaction. She discussed how the user interface of AI systems can be designed to better assist humans, facilitating human reasoning and enhancing users’ learning. In her talk she made the point that we should not just work on improving AI systems with human input, instead we should focus on how we can improve human capabilities through AI. 

The best poster and demo awards. Similarly to last year’s conference the decision about who has the best poster and demo was done through conference participants’ voting. Each person could give their vote to one poster and one demo that they personally feel should be awarded. Congrats to the winners for the well deserved awards and the gained trust by the community!

Outcomes of a collaborative project initiated during #HHAI2022.  Last year, a workshop on “Human-Centered Design of Symbiotic Hybrid Intelligence” took place, in conjunction with HHAI2022 (check out our previous blog post). During the workshop, we engaged in collaborative efforts to extract team design patterns, highlighting the roles of human and AI agents in specific hybrid intelligence solutions across diverse domains. The enthusiasm continued after the event as we sustained collaboration with organisers and participants, resulting in fruitful outcomes. I am delighted to share that our paper “Developing Team Design Patterns for Hybrid Intelligent Systems” was presented by Tina Mioch at HHAI2023. 

The social events. On Tuesday, a tour of LMU’s media informatics lab was organised. During the event, conference participants were given the chance to see and interact with AI projects, created by Ph.D. and master’s students. After engaging in a number of AI project discussions, we also received a recommendation for the best ice cream near the lab, which is believed to make your problems go away (white-chocolate pistachio flavour from Jessas Eis). 

On Wednesday, a welcoming reception was hosted at LMU. In this beautiful venue we enjoyed some delicious snacks and engaging discussions, contributing to a warm welcoming experience.

HHAI#2024.  Looking forward to visiting next year’s edition in Sweden, which will focus of HI for Social Good, and excited to be a part of the shaping of the Hybrid Intelligence vision as a science.