28-29 November 2023, Utrecht
Our 12th consortium (at the end of year 4) was dedicated to the arrival of our 2nd cohort of PhD students and postdocs, with onboarding for the 2nd cohort, while the 1st cohort discussed “their legacy and their future”. Plus ample meeting time for our Special Interest Groups (on Reinforcement Learning, on Dialogue, on Theory of Mind and on Ethics), and a brilliant keynote from Rineke Verbrugge who took us from the formalisation of Theory of Mind, through implementations in agents, all the way to experiments with human subjects.
And great Asian fusion food!
12-13 September 2023, Amsterdam
Speed dating with new arrivals, 1-minute madness plus posters, sessions on the Challenges, SIGs and Use Cases, an “ask me anything” panel, and a keynote on “HI: from vision to science”.
26-30 June, HHAI 2023, Munich
The 2nd edition of the Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence Conference, this year in Munich, was even bigger than the first edition that we hosted in 2022 in Amsterdam: more submissions, with more participants from more continents.
8-10 May 2023, Vlieland
We met for a 3 day HI fest on one of the Dutch islands, including workshops, poster presentations, an introduction to the new structure of HI, a HI movie night, and of course hiking, biking and board games. Matt Johnson from IHMC in Florida presented as in invited on on “Co-activity analysis” and guided the subsequent exercise to try and make a co-activity analysis for our two Case Studies on Diabetes and Robotic Surgery.
6 February 2023, Amersfoort
We broke a record with 70 participants meeting in the old railway workshops in Amersfoort. In the morning we wrapped up the Research Lines and introduced the new matrix structure with its Challenges and SIGs.
This was followed by a lively debate on the relevance (or otherwise) of ChatGPT for Hybrid Intelligence research, including awards for the most succesful, most promising and most catastropic failure of using ChatGPT for Hybrid Intelligence. The leaders of our twenty new PhD/PD projects pitched their ideas, and speeddated with the other participants, followed by a final round of discussions on our four use-cases.
22-23 September 2022, Hoofddorp
Well over 60 of us gathered in Hoofddorp for a two day meeting, including an overnight stay. The first day was devoted to our current research: we took stock of our progress by matching the current status of our projects against the capability tables we defined for ourselves in our project proposal, and we had two talks on Theory of Mind and on child-robot interaction. The second day was devoted to use-cases (including very exciting plans for a robotic surgery assistant and life-style management for diabetes patients), and we looked towards the future: what new research clusters are emerging, and how can these be used to organise the 20 new PhD/PD projects we will be launching in early 2023.
13-17 June, HHAI 2022 conference
Pretty much the entire consortium was present at the first Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence conference, HHAI 2022 at the VU Campus in Amsterdam, for a week of workshops, posters, paper presentations, keynotes and social interaction. See the video impression
11-12 March 2022, Delft
The full consortium spent two days in Delft designing mock-up HI systems, seeing demo’s of social robotics, hearing about the large-scale experiment from Bernd, Tiffany and Masha, and from the winners of the IGLU challenge, as well as more focused discussion in group meetings of the research lines. See here for a photo impression.
3 Feb 2022, vocabulary engineering
With 44(!) people online, we did a set of “serious online games” to acquire a more coherent conceptual vocabulary to speak about Hybrid Intelligence. A round of 13 parallel “20 questions” yielded some 150 different terms (including quite a few double candidates, which was a useful signal), a subsequent round of 13 parallel “card sorting” whittled this down to 40+ different higher level concepts. A final round of plenary voting applied these 40+ concepts to collections of terms extracted from the Miro-board circle diagrams for all of our projects that were constructed in our September meeting. Some of the clusterings of our conceptual terms are shown above.
11 Oct 2021, joint workshop with ESDIT on Agency
A joint online workshop with ESDIT, our sister Zwaartekracht project on Ethics of Distruptive Technologies, on the topic of (moral) agency. Some 20+ people attended talks by Vincent Müller, Pinar Yolum and Evert van Beek, with following discussions in breakout rooms.
17 September 2021: First F2F consortium meeting, PhDs in the spotlight
The programme of our first-ever in-person consortium-wide meeting puts the PhD students in the spotlight. The morning is devoted to a brainstorming and exchange session between the PhD students, in the afternoon 3 of the PhD students present their work, followed by a poster-market with the work of all PhD students.
7 July 2021: How HI are we?
Our second consortium meeting of 2021 (and hopefully the last one that needs to be online) is devoted to “how to measure Hybrid Intelligence”: metrics, benchmarks, test-environments, etc. Answering this question is of course crucial to monitoring our progress towards our goal of Hybrid Intelligent systems.
10 March 2021, storyboarding scenario's
Just under 40 members of the consortium developed story boards for two scenario’s, in behavioral health management and a debating educator. Mark Neerincx introduced us to scenario development and storyboarding, after which we split into break-out groups and developed storyboards using online tooling. Amazing how much creativity got unleashed.
15 December 2020, Ask me Anything, with Maarten de Rijke
Maarten de Rijke is one of our Principal Investigators, and on 15 December our young consortium members could ask him anything. And we really meant “anything“. Conversations ranged from the scientific (symbolic vs statistical methods) via the personal (how to prioritize your time) to the political (how to improve the Dutch science system). Enjoyed by all (including Maarten 🙂 ).
4 December 2020, Hybrid Intelligence: the good, the bad and the ugly
Together with the Zwaartekracht consortium on “Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies“, we organised an online workshop discussing “the good” and the “not-so-good” application potential of Hybrid Intelligence techniques, triggered by a lively email discussion on our mailing list. Organisers of the workshop were Bart Verheij and Birna van Riemsdijk, with 34 of us actively participating.
17 November 2020, Speeddating
To break out of the social bubbles that we’re all locked into, we organised a speeddating session. Thirty researchers in the consortium (2/3rds of them new arrivals) did 4 rounds of speeddating sessions with a random consortium member they didn’t know yet. That adds up to 60 conversations! Good fun, and to be repeated!
20 October 2020, Hybrid Intelligence Demonstrator scenario's
At our second consortium-wide meeting (with 70 attendants, online, again, in these days) we developed a number of domains and scenarios for Hybrid Intelligence demonstrators in different break-out rooms, based on input from all participants that we obtained through a questionnaire before the meeting.
9 October 2020, First Journal Club
Reading and discussion of “Evidence evaluation: A study of likelihoods and independence“, Silja Renooij (2016) http://proceedings.mlr.press/v52/renooij16.pdf
From 9 October onwards, the Journal Club is meeting every two weeks, with a different PhD student presenting a paper, followed by discussion and virtual “Friday afternoon drinks”.
7 July 2020, consortium meeting
During our first consortium-wide meeting (online, of course, in these days), we had
- a keynote from Ana Paiva on “Hybrid Groups of Humans and Agents: engineering sociality and collaboration”
- break-out groups for each of our 4 Research Lines where the newly joined PhD students could introduce themselves, and the first plans for work in the Research Lines were discussed
- plenary feedback from all of the Research Line break-outs, and a plenary discussion on the tools we will use to collaborate
2 December 2019, kick-off meeting
At our kick-off meeting, all our scientists dynamically paired in teams of supervisor and co-supervisor, and during the day we instantiated our overall project plan into 27 PhD proposals, to be used as the basis for recruiting our PhD students.