IDE welcomes new Professor and Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

Alessandro Bozzon has been appointed as Professor and chairman of the new chair in Human-Centered Intelligence.

Professor Bozzon’s background is in computer science, having received his PhD in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano (Italy), and joined TU Delft’s faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) in 2013. It is his growing interest in the human-aspect of computer science that has brought him to his new home in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.  

Professor Bozzon’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, human computation, and user modelling. “My research field is crowd-computing”, he says. “I investigate how individuals and crowds can efficiently and effectively be embedded in computational processes, with the ultimate goal of creating useful and fair intelligent products and services”. He gives the example of social media platforms like Facebook. “Only thirty percent of the content that should be moderated can be detected automatically. The remaining seventy percent is moderated manually – a laborious and slow process. As automation of content moderation is clearly needed, how do you guarantee quality and speed, while accounting, for instance, for societal and cultural differences?” 

Algorithms have been the focus of Professor Bozzon’s work but he wants to do explore more the human side of computing. “How can we design intelligent systems that really embed the values and needs of the people using them? I look forward to further exploring the human side of artificial intelligence with my new research colleagues and students in the faculty.” 

With his multidisciplinary research team, Professor Bozzon studies and builds novel human-centred artificial intelligence methods and tools that combine the cognitive and reasoning abilities of individuals and crowds, with the computational powers of machines, and the value of big amounts of heterogeneous data.  

He leads the Urban Data Science team at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions. Alessandro Bozzon is also a member of the Delft Data Science and the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for BOLD (Big, Open and Linked Data) Cities initiatives.