In the coming year, Imperial College Business School intends to use videos of student exercises to analyse features of conversational interactions that explain how some teams manage to engage in sustained and robust debates that often lead to breakdowns in communication.

Particularly in conflictual work, this engagement is essential to solving complex problems, making the best decisions, and completing difficult tasks. This work leverages advances in machine learning applied to recognition of speech (including both linguistic and prosodic features of speech), emotions conveyed in facial and hand gestures, and sequences of behaviours on conversational turn-taking (including interruptions).

It is being integrated into instructional exercises for both in-person and online courses, and is also being built to scale up for larger audiences to encourage a healthy mix of honest engagement and civility.

Find out more and contact the IDEA Lab.