Pro-social Computing

Pro-social computing is one if my current challenges!

I’m working towards a future where autonomous agents are used to foster and support pro-social behaviour in a hybrid society of humans and machines. Pro-social behaviour occurs when people and agents perform costly actions that benefit others. Acts such as helping others voluntarily, donating to charity, providing information or sharing resources, are all forms of pro-social behaviour. Two main questions guide this research which challenges the purely utilitarian view of human decision making and its role in hybrid societies: What are the conditions and mechanisms that lead societies of agents and humans to be more pro-social? How can we engineer autonomous entities (agents and robots) that lead to more altruistic and cooperative behaviours in a hybrid society? These are some of the questions that I’ve been trying to address in my research in the area of social agents. See more in the AAAI’18 paper. This paper won a Blue Sky ideas paper award at AAAI’18 (see more about this award).