Bashir to speak at artificial intelligence conference

Masooda Bashir
Masooda Bashir, Associate Professor

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir will present her research on trust formation in human-agent collaboration at the Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) 2019, which will be held September 5-6 in London. The conference, which brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, focuses on areas of intelligent systems and artificial intelligence and how they apply to the real world.

Bashir will present her paper, "'If You Agree with Me, Do I Trust You?': An Examination of Human-Agent Trust from a Psychological Perspective." According to Bashir, "Applications of automated agent systems in daily life have changed the role of human operators from a controller to a teammate. However, this 'teammate' relationship between humans and agents raises an important but challenging question of trust."

Bashir's paper details the two-part online experiment she conducted to examine the effect of attitudinal congruence and individual personalities on users' trust toward an anthropomorphic agent.

"Although our data does not support the effect of attitudinal congruence on human-agent trust formation, the study provides essential empirical evidence that benefits future research in the field," she said. "More importantly, this study provides insight for the future design of automated agent systems."

Bashir's research interests lie at the interface of information technology, human psychology, and society; especially how privacy, security, and trust intersect from a psychological point of view with information systems. At Illinois, she serves as the director of Social Sciences in Engineering Research in the College of Engineering and holds appointments in the Information Trust Institute, Coordinated Science Laboratory, Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, and Beckman Institute. Before coming to Illinois, Bashir worked for several years as a systems analyst, technical trainer, manager, and global manager for a number of corporations in Silicon Valley, including Lotus and IBM. She holds degrees in mathematics, computer science, and psychology and earned her PhD in psychology from Purdue University.

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