Keynote Speakers
Alessandro Vinciarelli, University of Glasgow (United Kingdom)
Alessandro Vinciarelli (http://vinciarelli.net) is Full Professor at the University of Glasgow and his main research interest is Social Signal Processing, the AI domain aimed at modelling, analysis and synthesis of verbal and nonverbal behaviour in human-human and human-machine interactions. He published more than 200 works in the area and he is, or has been, PI and co-PI of 15 national and international projects. Since 2019, he is Director and PI of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents (http://socialcdt.org), an interdisciplinary initiative that attracted 70+ PhD students working at the crossroad between AI and Psychology. Furthermore, Alessandro is among the leaders of The Participatory Harm Auditing Workbenches and Methodologies Project (http://phawm.org), the UK effort aimed at developing methodologies for the auditing of AI technologies, especially in ethically sensitive cases like the detection of mental health issues. During the last years, Alessandro has been general chair and program chair of several international conferences, including the IEEE Conference on Social Computing and the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction. Finally, he is co-founder of Klewel (http://klewel.com), a knowledge management company recognized with several awards, and scientific advisor of Substrata (http://substrata.me), an emerging startup applying social signal processing for the analysis of high stakes sales.
Frances Gardner, University of Oxford, UK
Frances Gardner, FAcSS, is Professor of Child and Family Psychology at the University of Oxford, Dept of Social Policy and Intervention. Her 30-year career in parenting and child mental health research involves developing, testing, and scaling up in-person, digital and hybrid parenting interventions in many countries, including UK and USA. She is co-founder of the Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) programmes in low- and middle-income countries, with projects in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. Her parenting evaluations and systematic reviews are highly cited (over 21,000 times), including seminal studies of the transportability of parenting interventions across cultures and countries, their essential components, and analyses of moderator effects. Currently she is Senior Research Investigator for The Global Parenting Initiative (GPI), a five-year collaboration of universities, foundations, and implementing partners in over 20 countries which, through digital innovation, aims to provide access to free, evidence-based, playful parenting support to every parent, so that they are equipped with knowledge and tools to help their children realise their learning potential, improve their well-being, and to prevent family violence.
Professor Gardner works closely with policymakers, leading the teams conducting the systematic reviews for the 2022 WHO Guideline on Parenting Interventions, and the 2024 WHO Guide to Designing, Implementing, and Scaling up Parenting Interventions. Her work has influenced government and NGO parenting policy in many countries and regions, working with UNICEF, UNODC, WHO, the UK National Parenting Academy, and government ministries of many countries. In 2019 she received the Nan Tobler Award from the Society for Prevention Research, and in 2021 was elected as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Conference Programme
To be announced