Keynotes

A (Persuasive?) Speech on Automated Persuasion

by Oliviero Stock (FBK-IRST, Italy),
supported by Pandora

Philosophers of language have taught us that at the basis of language production there is the intention to change the state of the world by intervening linguistically on other agents. Persuasion, being the process of influencing attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, mood of a target, is a matter of stronger emphasis. Argumentation is just one resource to persuasion, it has been studied since the times of Aristotle and now for quite some time in artificial intelligence. In modern times we have witnessed also resorting to what is called a peripheral route to persuasion. Automated intelligent persuasion of this sort (and also defense from inappropriate persuasion) is a research area close to producing usable results, both through creative production of language expressions, and through other forms of communication. The theme is sensitive and so it is equally important to address ethical acceptability of persuading machines.
The talk makes reference to concrete studies conducted within the Per Te project.

About the Speaker

Oliviero Stock has been at IRST since 1988 and has been its director from 1997 to 2001. His activity is mainly in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent user interfaces, cognitive technologies, computational creativity. He is the author of over two hundred and fifty peer-reviewed papers and author or editor of twelve volumes, and has been a member of the editorial board of a dozen scientific journals. He has been Chairman of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), President of the Association for Computational Linguistics and of the Italian AI Association and is an ECCAI and a AAAI Fellow. Since 2012 he has been directing the Per Te project concerned with various aspects of intelligent persuasion technologies.