Thursday
Room 4
17:40 - 18:40
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
Panel: When AI Feels Empathic
There’s a word for what a person feels when someone truly listens to them, then understands and shares their experience and perspective. There isn’t one for what happens when a language model does it.
Panel moderator: Richard Campbell
Panellists: Michelle Frost, Martine Dowden, Tessel Haagen
We’ve been borrowing terms from psychology that don’t quite fit, and then defaulting to technical terms that don’t reach far enough. In the space between, we’re shipping systems that produce and evoke something real in people: attachment, relief, dependency, maybe genuine help. And we’re doing it without the language to describe what that actually is, or any shared understanding of what it should require from the developers and technologists making those decisions.
This gap is showing up in the lives of people who are already vulnerable, as well as in real moments of benefit we would be wrong to dismiss. As an industry, we don’t have this figured out. Neither does anyone on this panel. We have different backgrounds, different experiences and instincts, things we will genuinely agree or disagree on, and we think this conversation belongs here, with the people who are actually shipping our future.
Richard Campbell
Richard Campbell wrote his first line of code in 1977. His career has spanned the computing industry, both on the hardware and software sides, development, and operations. He was a co-founder of Strangeloop Networks, acquired by Radware in 2013, and was on the board of directors of Telerik, which was acquired by Progress Software in 2014. Today, he is a consultant and advisor to several successful technology firms and hosts three podcasts: .NET Rocks! (www.dotnetrocks.com) for .NET developers, RunAs Radio (www.runasradio.com) for IT Professionals, and Windows Weekly (https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly).
Michelle Frost
Michelle Frost is an AI and machine learning practitioner, Microsoft AI MVP, and AI Advocate at JetBrains. She is also the founder of Accountable Intelligence, where she consults on AI governance and responsible AI strategy.
She holds a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from Johns Hopkins University and brings over a decade of experience across data science, engineering, and enterprise AI systems to questions of fairness, accountability, transparency, privacy, and risk. Her work spans AI and machine learning strategy, responsible AI development, and governance for high-risk domains, with a particular interest in building systems that keep humans meaningfully in the lead.
Michelle speaks on AI ethics, accessibility, inclusion, and the human impact of emerging technologies. Outside of work, Michelle can usually be found in her garden or with her nose in a book.
Martine Dowden
Focusing on web interfaces that are beautiful, functional, accessible, and usable, Martine approaches User Experience from both Art and Science, drawing from her degrees in Psychology and Visual Communications. She is a Web Technologies, Firebase, and Angular GDE as well as a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies. Martine stays active in the industry by writing articles, leading workshops, and speaking at conferences and meetups worldwide. An accomplished author, her latest book, Tiny CSS Projects was released in 2023.
Tessel Haagen
Tessel is a consultant in data & AI at Info Support, specialized in interpretable AI. In her daily work, she applies AI-augmented engineering to build and evaluate intelligent systems. She is known as an enthusiastic knowledge source and an insatiably curious lifelong learner. Outside of work, she channels her strategic thinking into board games (with a soft spot for complex strategy games) and escapes into fantasy novels. With an MSc in Artificial Intelligence, an MSc in Computer Science, and an MA in Linguistics, she combines a strong technical foundation with a deep interest in language and reasoning.