Advances in technologies and interface design are enabling group activities of varying complexities to be carried out, in whole or in part, over the internet, with benefits to science and society (e.g., citizen science, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) and questions-and-answers sites). The need to support human interaction in such settings brings new and significant challenges to AI; how to provide incentives that keep participants motivated and productive; how to provide useful, information to system designers to help them decide whether and how to intervene with the group's work; how to scientifically evaluate the effects of AI interventions on the performance of individuals and the group. I will describe ongoing projects in my lab that address these challenges in three socially relevant settings — education, Q&A sites and citizen science--- and discuss potential ethical issues that arise from using AI for behavior change in the real world.
Kobi Gal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Reader in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
His contributions to AI research are in multi-agent collaboration, human-computer decision-making and the design of technologies for addressing real world problems in such domains as education, citizen science, participatory democracy and negotiation.
Gal was awarded the Wolf Foundation's Krill prize for Israeli scientists and a Marie Curie European Union International fellowship. He and his research group have received several best-paper awards in top tier conferences. He is a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and has served as the chairperson of the Israeli Association for Artificial Intelligence. An award winning teacher, he has incorporated innovative ideas from research into the classroom.