Dr Benjamin R Cowan is Associate Professor at UCD’s School of Information & Communication Studies. He completed his undergraduate studies in Psychology & Business Studies (2006) as well as his PhD in Usability Engineering (2011) at the University of Edinburgh. His research lies at the juncture between psychology, human-computer interaction and communication systems in investigating how people interact with collaborative conversational AI. His recent research has focuses specifically on how theory and quantitative methods from psychological science can be applied to understand and design collaborative conversational AI experiences. Dr Cowan is the co-founder and co-director of the HCI@UCD group, one of the largest HCI groups in Ireland, co-founder of the SFI D-REAL Centre for Research Training and is a co-PI in the SFI ADAPT Centre, a €100 million research centre conducting cutting edge research on the future of AI driven content technologies.
Key areas of interest are in the Innovative Digital Technologies domain. Specifically He is interested in supervising projects in areas that use psychological science and dialogue research to design innovate and impactful societal conversational AI tools in the areas of sustainability and digital innovation.