Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) personalities are playing an increasing role in our everyday lives. In addition to our personal assistants, industries such as education, healthcare, hospitality, transportation, and law are using AI to varying degrees. As conversational AI becomes integrated in our society, we need to give serious thought to mindfully creating these personalities and conversations. These are personalities that are not only going to be keeping us company and helping to make our daily lives easier, but coaching us into changing our behavior, helping us navigate the world, and teaching our children.
Creating AI Conversations is a series of panel discussions that will delve into the thinking, research, and process around crafting the personalities, conversations, and interactions of AI entities with people. This topic this week, Behavior Change and AI.
Geoffrey Cohen is Professor of Organizational Studies in Education and Business, Stanford Graduate School of Education; Professor of Psychology and Professor of Organizational Behavior (by courtesy) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Professor Cohen's research examines processes related to identity maintenance and their implications for social problems. One primary aim of his research is the development of theory-driven, rigorously tested intervention strategies that further our understanding of the processes underpinning social problems and that offer solutions to alleviate them.
Alison Darcy is the CEO & Founder of Woebot Labs Inc. The company aims to make the best psychological tools accessible for everyone. She created Woebot, a friendly AI-powered chatbot that delivers cognitive behavior therapy as a guided self help intervention. A clinical research psychologist, Alison was Faculty in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine for a decade where she developed digital health interventions for young people. With a technical and scientific background, Alison works at the intersection of mental health and technology.
Rama Akkiraju is a Director, Distinguished Engineer, and Master Inventor at IBM’s Watson Division where she leads the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans. In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, and semantic Web services, for which she led a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters, and over 50 technical papers. Rama has over dozen issued patents and 20+ pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research.
Cory Kidd is the founder and CEO of Catalia Health. The company develops a hardware and software platform that uses a combination of psychology and artificial intelligence to engage patients through interactive conversations. These conversations happen through mobile, web, and interactive robotic interfaces; together these interfaces create a relationship that can reach patients at any time they need support. Dr. Kidd has been working in healthcare technology for nearly two decades.
Elizabeth Arredondo is a mediaX Visiting Scholar and moderator of the panel series. Her research focuses on creating conversations with automated agents; she currently designs the personality, backstory, and the conversations for a robotic wellness coach named Mabu at Catalia Health. After earning her MFA in Writing for Screen and TV from USC's School for Cinematic Arts in 2005, Elizabeth received a feature film writing fellowship and participated in NBC's "Writers on the Verge" program. Elizabeth went on to work as a staff writer on the primetime CBS drama COLD CASE and develop original pilots.
