Keynote at Building Bridges Conference

Adam Brandt was an invited keynote speaker at Building Bridges: A Symposium on Human–AI Interaction, hosted by the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick on 21 November 2025. His talk, “Building bridges between applied linguistics and industry: the case of conversation analysts and AI clinical assistants,” presented the Newcastle Interactional AI team’s collaboration with Ufonia as a worked example of how applied linguistic research can be embedded directly into the design of a deployed clinical AI system.

The symposium brought together researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of human–AI interaction, and the keynote slot positions our conversation-analytic approach as a recognised contribution to that broader cross-disciplinary conversation. The talk made the case — drawing on more than twelve formal report deliverables to Ufonia between March 2023 and November 2025 — that the gap between academic conversation analysis and industrial conversation design is not just bridgeable but already being bridged in routine NHS deployment, and that the partnership model itself is a transferable contribution. The keynote is the second high-profile invited talk delivered by the team in the autumn of 2025, following Spencer Hazel’s BAAL keynote at Glasgow (4–6 September)

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/researchandnetworks/calendar/building_bridges/