ΑΙhub.org
 

Can machines read our minds?


by
20 March 2020



share this:

AIhub | Nello Cristianini | Can machines read minds
Many of us spend a significant portion of our day online and, in doing so, through our interactions with social media and IoT devices, leave a trail of “digital footprints” in our wake. Could this data be used by machine learning algorithms to infer psychometric information about us, including our emotions, attitudes, aptitudes, beliefs and more? A team at the University of Bristol have been finding out.

In an article published in Minds and Machines the Bristol team review 26 empirical studies; these studies concern deploying algorithms to predict personal information using online data. One of the key aims of the review is to better understand a research trend that has emerged across a wide range of communities and to explore the philosophical and ethical consequences of the techniques being developed. The team were interested in understanding what kind of psychological information can be inferred on the basis of our online activities, and whether an intelligent system could use this information to improve its ability to subsequently steer our behaviour towards its own goals.

The studies reviewed covered the inference (from “digital footprints”) of the following: affect and emotion, aptitudes and skills, attitudes and orientations, personality, and disorders and conditions. The team found that it is possible for machine learning algorithms to infer such information about us on the basis of online samples of our behaviour. They also learned that it is possible for the algorithms to be used to segment users into groups that share some psychological trait or mental state.

This work identifies just a portion of the many studies in which different types of behavioural samples could be used by an algorithm to infer information about us. Many more methods are still being studied and developed across different communities for the same purpose.

As the types and amount of interaction between us and our online devices increases, and as new types of sensors for measuring behavioural signals are developed, there is the expectation that by combining these sources of information a machine learning algorithm could form a very accurate image of us. The likely convergence of these technologies and methods raises many ethical issues. These issues will not be solved entirely by legislation, and the individual research communities should not be expected to develop ethical guidelines on their own. Rather, it is imperative that policymakers and researchers understand the scope of these developments, in order to better facilitate the ongoing discussions about the growing use and convergence of such machines.

Read the published papers to find out more:
Can Machines Read our Minds? Burr, C. & Cristianini, N. Minds & Machines (2019).

An Analysis of the Interaction Between Intelligent Software Agents and Human Users Burr, C., Cristianini, N. & Ladyman, J. Minds & Machines (2018) 28: 735.

This work is part of the ERC ThinkBIG project, Principal Investigator Nello Cristianini, University of Bristol.




Nello Cristianini is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol.
Nello Cristianini is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol.




            AIhub is supported by:


Related posts :



Livestream of RoboCup2025

  18 Jul 2025
Watch the competition live from Salvador!

A behaviour monitoring dataset of wild mammals in the Swiss Alps

  17 Jul 2025
Scientists at EPFL have created MammAlps, a multi-view, multi-modal video dataset that captures how wild mammals behave in the Swiss Alps.

#ICML2025 social media round-up 1

  16 Jul 2025
Find out what participants have been getting up to during the first couple of days of the conference.

Congratulations to the #ICML2025 award winners!

  16 Jul 2025
Find out which articles have won the outstanding paper, outstanding position paper, and the test-of-time awards.

Tackling the 3D Simulation League: an interview with Klaus Dorer and Stefan Glaser

  15 Jul 2025
With RoboCup2025 starting today, we found out more about the 3D simulation league, and the new simulator they have in the works.

What’s coming up at #RoboCup2025?

  10 Jul 2025
Find out when the different leagues competitions and the symposium are taking place.

Wildlife researchers train AI to better identify animal species in trail camera photos

  09 Jul 2025
Scientists are working on improving AI performance in wildlife monitoring through species and environment-specific training.

What’s on the programme at #ICML2025?

  07 Jul 2025
Find out what the International Conference on Machine Learning has in store.



 

AIhub is supported by:






©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence