Human Interaction

Technology is transforming human relationships. It creates new environments for human interaction through social media, video conferencing and virtual worlds. Technology is also being proposed as a substitute for human interaction e.g., chatbots, virtual assistants and robot companions. These technologies are revolutionising human identities, relationships and communities. 

Our research investigates how these transformations impact on the quality of human interactions. We build on theories of human interaction from the social sciences and we exploit the opportunities technology provides to push research in new directions. We analyse the quality of human encounters in these new environments; we exploit the quantitative data they generate to explore human interaction on new scales and at new resolutions, and we build new tools that enrich and augment human interaction.