The 4th TRR 318 Conference is dedicated to a perspective that is gaining increasing attention in explainable AI research: Social XAI (sXAI). The focus is on the idea of understanding explainability not merely as a technical property of AI systems, but as a social practice. Accordingly, the theme of the upcoming conference is “Scaffolding Social XAI.”
The term “scaffolding” describes social and communicative support processes that help people reflect on and contextualize ideas, assumptions, and technologies. This also encompasses the ability to critically evaluate AI-generated results in practical application areas, such as performance assessment or diagnostics. It also includes new forms of XAI competence as situational competence.
The conference invites researchers from various disciplines to submit papers that address explainability as a social phenomenon.
The focus includes, among other things, the following topics:
- explanatory practices in dyadic interaction
- explainability and interpretability in AI systems
- explanation processes embedded in institutional and organizational settings.
Submission deadline: November 1, 2026
Conference date: March 16–17, 2027
Location: Paderborn University
Interested parties may submit their extended abstracts via EasyChair.
