ForMoRe Workshop
Chairs
- Chiara Bassetti, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
- Stefano Borgo, Laboratory of Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR
Organizers
- Social Pattern Recognition Lab (SPaRe Lab), Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
- Hans Schadee Methods Center (HSC), Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
- Laboratory of Applied Ontology, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council (LOA, ISTC-CNR)
Description
ForMoRe is an interdisciplinary workshop on the methods and techniques of formalization, modellization, and representation of micro-sociological theories and analyses for a varied set of scientific and technological applications.
Qualitative social research —particularly interactionist and ethnomethodological approaches (e.g., conversation analysis and video-based field studies)— generates rich data and offers detailed, in-depth analysis, yet it often fails in formalising them (e.g. via ontological analysis), in providing a synthetic model, in making datasets statistically inspectable and/or computable (e.g. for social signal processing, or robot architectures). This reduces the potential impact, circulation, and exploitation —across disciplinary communities— of those analyses.
The communication, understanding, and use of these knowledge basis and its empirical analytical potential is however crucial. Whereas social research, and qualitative methods in particular, are by now recognised, studied and used in Human-Computer Interaction, other areas within the computer and information sciences still remain partially unaware of the potentialities of micro-sociological theories, analyses and findings. Too often, both cognition and (social) behaviour —not to mention culture— are conceptualized as individual-based phenomena (to which, e.g., a social robot should adapt, as in personalization), thereby missing the inter-actionist layer of human life as much as of human-machine cooperation.
The ForMoRe workshop aims at creating an interdisciplinary space of mutual exchange and collaboration among those who are interested in developing and pushing the boundaries of what we mean by:
- social pattern recognition
- social signal processing
- social robotics
- trustworthy AI
- industry 5.0
- experimental ethnography and ethnomethodological experiments
- mixed symbolic and data-driven models and machine learning
- any combination thereof
- … (we are pushing boundaries, please feel free to contribute your own border-to-be-(re)moved).
A few examples of what we tried to do towards this direction
- Bassetti, C., Blanzieri, E., Borgo, S., Marangon, S. (2023), ‘Towards socially-competent and culturally-adaptive artificial agents. Expressive order, interactional disruptions and recovery strategies’, Interaction Studies, Special Issue on Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems.
- Setti, F., D. Conigliaro, P. Rota, C. Bassetti, N. Conci, N. Sebe, M. Cristani (2017), ‘The S-HOCK Dataset: A new benchmark for spectator crowd analysis’, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 159, pp. 47-58.
- Setti, F., C. Russel, C. Bassetti, M. Cristani (2015), ‘F-formation Detection: Individuating Free-standing Conversational Groups in Images’, PLOS One, 10, 5, e0123783.
- Bassetti, C. (2017), ‘Social interaction in temporary gatherings. A sociological taxonomy of groups and crowds for computer vision practitioners’, in M. Cristani, V. Murino, S. Savarese, S. Shah (eds.), Group and Crowd Behavior for Computer Vision, Elsevier, pp. 15-28.
Preliminary Programme
9.30 Opening
10.00 Keynote Talk: Alessandro Vinciarelli, Glasgow University
11.00 Coffee Break
11.30 Presentations by participants – including light lunch
15.30 Open discussion and future plans
16.30 Closing