AI Center Seminar - Prof. Li CHEN - "Designing Conversational Music Agents for Self-Awareness and Psychological Well-being"

The talk is jointly organized by the EPFL AI Center and the EPFL Human-Computer Interaction Group as part of the AI for Health seminar series.

Hosting professor: Prof. Pearl Pu (GR-PU)

Title
Beyond Recommendations: Designing Conversational Music Agents for Self-Awareness and Psychological Well-being

Abstract
As the demand for scalable mental health tools grows, the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) lies in their ability to move beyond generic retrieval toward deeply adaptive, trustworthy support. This talk explores how music-driven conversational systems can bridge the gap between algorithmic recommendation and psychological intervention. The journey begins with establishing a foundation of trust through user-centric exploration. Using conversational music recommenders as a case study, I will discuss how critiquing strategies—such as progressive and cascading suggestions—shape user perceptions of helpfulness and serendipity. However, because trust is personal, I demonstrate how individual traits, including personality and trust propensity, dictate whether a user thrives under system-led or user-led initiatives.
Building on this rapport, the talk examines how these interfaces transition from suggesting songs to fostering psychological well-being. I will illustrate how music acts as a catalyst for self-awareness, using agents to guide users through emotional resonance and self-reflection. Furthermore, I will share findings on the role of generative AI in music-based reminiscence for older adults, where adaptive dialogue helps overcome cognitive barriers to memory recall. Collectively, these studies provide a roadmap for designing AI that moves beyond the playlist, transforming music-based chatbots into sustained partners for emotional and psychological health.

Bio
Professor Li Chen is currently a Full Professor and Associate Head (Research) in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). She obtained her PhD degree in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Peking University, China. Her recent research focus has mainly been on conversational AI, explainable AI, recommender systems, and human-computer interaction. She has authored and co-authored over 160 publications, with over 13,000 citations (H-index 53). Her co-authored papers have received several awards, such as the RecSys’24 Best Student Paper Award, CHI’22 Honourable Mention Award, UMAP’20 Best Student Paper Award, UMUAI 2018 Best Paper Award, and UMAP’15 Best Student Paper Award. She received the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Teaching (Individual) 2024/25 and the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Research Supervision 2022/23. She has been included in the list of the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists by Stanford University since 2021, and the list of the Best Computer Science Scientists 2025/2026 by Research.com.

She is now an ACM senior member, founding co-editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS), steering committee member of ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), associate editor of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS), editorial board member of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction Journal (UMUAI), and associate editor of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS). She has also served as program co-chair of IUI’26, general co-chair of ACM RecSys’23, program co-chair of ACM RecSys’20, and program co-chair of ACM UMAP’18.