Christopher Lucas

Researcher in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, in the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation

Session: The human side of conversational AI

Christopher Lucas is a Reader in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, in the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation. His research involves a combination of machine learning and experimental psychology, though which he tries to shed light on how people make sense of the world around them. This includes the human ability to seek out and generate explanations, discover causal relationships, combine first-hand experience and social communication, and discover new concepts. His group's current projects include a general theory of the kinds of causal explanations, e.g., answers to "why" questions, that people prefer, supported by several new experiments and retrospective analyses of past data sets. He is currently working with PhD students and colleagues in informatics to adapt this account to allow autonomous vehicles to provide their passengers with clear and satisfying explanations of their behaviour.