UCLIC Seminar: Supporting learning of social and emotional skills by digital technology

Speaker: Petr Slovak, TU Wien
UCL Contact: Sandy Gould (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 06 May 15, 15:00 - 16:00
Venue: 1.02

Abstract

I will discuss a series of on-going projects in which we aim to understand how digital technology can facilitate the development and learning of social and emotional skills. Drawing on recent results to be presented at CHI'15 and CSCW'15, I will emphasise two specific case studies. In the first, we cooperate with a MSc. counselling program at the University of Nottingham to explore how feedback of bio-signals and other data can be used to support the training of student counsellors. The second then focuses on how technology can facilitate social and emotional skills learning more broadly, working in collaboration with researchers and developers of 'Social and Emotional Learning' (SEL) curricula in educational psychology. These curricula are already deployed in over 40% of primary schools within US, as part of prevention programs for both in-risk and general populations, thus providing an opportunity for an interesting test-bed for new technologies in this space.

This research is funded by the OEAW DOC Fellowship and pursued in cooperation between HCI group at Technical University of Vienna, Mixed Reality Lab and Culture Lab (counselling part); as well as with Committee for Children and Microsoft Research Redmond (SEL curricula part).

Petr Slovak

Petr Slovak is a Doctoral Candidate in the HCI Group at Vienna University of Technology, supervised by Geraldine Fitzpatrick. He holds a BSc in Psychology/Sociology in addition to BSc. & MSc. in Computer Science, and his PhD is funded by the DOC Fellowship from Austrian Academy of Sciences. Petr's research focuses on support for teaching of social and emotional skills in educational and therapeutical settings, with specific interest on empathy. As part of his PhD project, Petr has built collaborations with researchers from University of Nottingham (UK), Newcastle University (UK), Philips Research (NL), Committee for Children (US), and Microsoft Research (Redmond, US).