Keynote Speakers

June 16, 2013 - 5PM Josep Call Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Why do apes cooperate?

Cooperation is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and yet, humans have turned cooperation into one of their defining features.  Our level of cooperation has become such that members of our species can cooperate with large numbers of genetically unrelated partners for extended periods of time, in some cases spanning generations.  How did this come about over evolutionary time?  In this talk, I will turn to our closest living relatives, the great apes, in an attempt to throw some light into this question.  I will explore the prosocial behavior of the great apes defined as one individual doing something resulting in the benefit of another.  In particular, I will present data on helping and collaboration in chimpanzees, bonobos, and orang-utans and compare it with data on children presented with comparable tasks.  I will use these comparative data to uncover the socio-ecological and motivational factors that determine the emergence of cooperation in humans and nonhuman apes.

June 17, 2013 - 8:30AM Kori Inkpen Microsoft Research, USA Connecting Kids: The Future of Video

Understanding how kids connect with video may hold the key to delivering the long-awaited promise of video communication. Children's play is rich, creative and imaginative and research shows that children’s play easily transcends distance through the use of video. And remarkably, children are extremely comfortable interacting over video. This talk highlights several recent projects that demonstrate children’s rich, social interactions using video to connect with friends and family, regardless of whether they live in the same neighbourhood, or on the other side of the world. As these technologies become embedded into the fabric of daily life, video will transform children’s social interactions in both learning and play, enabling them to share rich experiences in ways not possible with current technologies.

June 17, 2013 - 3:30PM Justine Cassell Carnegie Mellon University, USA Connection Machines: The Role of Rapport in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

In thinking about the ways in which computers can support learning we often concentrate on the task or cognitive aspects of the collaboration between human and machine. However,the social nature of some of the best kinds of human-human learning interactions does not need to be left behind in human-computer collaborative learning, and understanding the social nature of human-human peer collaborative learning can help us to design computational systems that are most effective in real world contexts. To that end, in this talk I report on a series of studies that look at the building of rapport between humans over time, and between humans and computational systems. I look at the effects of this rapport building on peer learning among young children, junior highschool students, and adults, when the learning partners are actual human peers and computer peers. From the results of these studies I draw conclusions about the need for studies of actual human-human interaction to inform the design of collaborative learning technologies and, more generally, the need for models of the interaction between humans and computers to draw on not just technical but also social and cultural phenomena.