There is a growing need for understanding the changes caused by social interactions in realistic settings, from pairs to large groups and crowds at the behavioural, neural and physiological levels. Based on this, this workshop seeks to review how new technologies for interacting artificial agents can be and are being used to increase our knowledge deeper social interaction involving, for instance, emotion, and factors of embodiment and cognition. Realistic interaction contexts require new experimental tools and paradigms, combining social sciences and humanities with neuroscience, engineering and computing. This is necessary to ground future social media with the aim of improving social engagement, mutual understanding, collaboration, cognitive resonance, with outputs in entertainment and wellbeing, among others.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts in three complementary fields. From humanities, to core of researches in linguistics and social sciences has been to investigate behavioural and cognitive underpinning of natural social interactions through speech. In neuroscience, investigating natural social interactions with modern neuroimaging techniques is the new frontier that must be reached to truly understand the neural specificities of normal as well as pathological human behaviours. Computer science has made tremendous progresses in the extraction of social signal from multimodal data, including audio and video recordings of natural interactions. In addition, computer science allow us to close the loop, by providing controllable artificial agents – such as computer animated agents or humanoid robots – that can be used as benchmarks to test hypotheses about behaviours influencing the social competence of an agent.