MediaFutures director professor Christoph Trattner together with an international team organises a bridge event at the world leading AI conference AAAI in Singapore next January. Read how you can submit a paper below.

The event Bridging AI and Behavior Change (ABC) brings together the AI and behavioral science communities to address the urgent need for responsible, explainable, and effective behavior-aware technologies. With the rapid rise of LLM, generative AI, reinforcement learning, and agentic systems capable of shaping human decisions, this bridge aims to establish common ground between technical innovation and behavioral science theories of decision-making, nudging, and motivation. Their objective is to catalyze sustained collaboration across AI, psychology, behavioral economics, digital health, sustainability, and public policy, enabling the design of ethical and transparent interventions for health, well-being, sustainability, and civic engagement.

Key themes include:

• personalization vs. public interest
• boundaries of responsible nudging
• intervention design and adaptive/optimal treatment assignment
• evaluation frameworks for long-term behavior change, habit formation, and mental health/wellness
• bias and equity in algorithmic decision-making
• ethics, transparency, and compliance with emerging regulations (e.g., EU AI Act)
• cross-domain applications in health, sustainability, education, social media interventions, and civic participation
• reinforcement learning for efficient exploration
• psychological science foundations
• and the development of shared protocols, datasets, recommender systems, and explanation frameworks for trustworthy, behavior-aware AI.

The ABC Bridge is a 1-day in-person program combining education, collaboration, and outreach:

• Education (Morning): Tutorials introducing behavioral science for AI researchers and AI methods for behavioral scientists; a hands-on case lab on AI-driven nudging.
• Collaboration (Afternoon): Paper and poster presentations; debate on “Can AI nudge responsibly without manipulation?”; breakout groups co-developing draft Responsible Nudging Guidelines.
• Outreach (Closing): A plenary summary panel and a motivational talk at the AAAI main conference to communicate the Bridge’s vision and recommendations to the broader AI community.

We anticipate 30–50 participants, including AI/ML researchers, behavioral scientists, ethicists, HCI scholars, public health experts, and early-career researchers.

Submission requirements

We invite Short (2–4 pages), Long (4–8 pages), Vision (4–6 pages), Position (2–4 pages), and Demo (2–4 pages) papers or extended abstracts highlighting interdisciplinary research, position statements, or case studies relevant to responsible AI and behavior change. Submissions will be reviewed by the bridge committee.

Submission site information https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=aaai2026abc

Bridge Chair

• Mehrdad Rostami, University of Oulu, Finland – mehrdad.rostami@oulu.fi ·
• Christoph Trattner (University of Bergen, Norway) – christoph.trattner@uib.no ·
• Alexander Felfernig (Graz University of Technology, Austria) – alexander.felfernig@tugraz.at ·
• Michael Sobolev (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center / USC, USA) – msobolev@usc.edu ·
• Mourad Oussalah (University of Oulu, Finland) – mourad.oussalah@oulu.fi