Talk and workshop at HUMIC

HUMIC symposium and ConvoClub workshop on conversation analysis for AI (16–17 June 2026)

Adam Brandt and Spencer Hazel will spend two days at the University of Surrey in mid-June, first presenting the team's latest Encoding Empathy work at the inaugural HUMIC symposium on 16 June, and then Adam leading a hands-on ConvoClub workshop for industry conversation designers on 17 June. The back-to-back talks connect a fast-moving academic conversation on human–machine interaction with the practical, workflow-level decisions that conversation designers make every day.

At HUMIC (Humans and Machines in Conversation: Linguistic, Social and Relational Perspectives, hosted by Dr Doris Dippold), Brandt and Hazel will present "'Encoding Empathy' into an AI-powered agent for telephone-based clinical consultations: conversation analysis in the design of conversational AI", co-authored with Ufonia colleagues Yajie Vera He, Ernest Lim, Jared Joselowitz and Zachary Ellis. The paper reports preliminary findings from the Innovate UK-funded project with University of York and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: how the team identified empathy practices in clinician–patient calls in a bone fracture liaison service, and how those practices were translated into the prompts now guiding Dora's conversational behaviour. The programme also features keynotes from Maaike Groenewege (Convocat), Christian Hildebrand (University of St Gallen) and Bettina Migge (UCD Dublin).

The following day, Adam Brandt will lead a ConvoClub workshop introducing the Conversation Analytic concept of "third position", the turn in which an agent responds to a user's answer, and showing how CA research on it can inform prompt design for chatbots and voice agents. Through hands-on exercises, participants will learn to evaluate and improve agent responses, with a focus on making interactions more user-friendly and reducing unnecessary verbosity.

The session continues a sustained programme of practitioner-facing engagement that has previously included workshops at Google HQ London and plenary talks at Unparsed and Beyond Boundaries.

Related link: EMCA Wiki on third position

Contact

School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences

Newcastle University

NE1 7RU Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

info@interactionalai.com

Address