The Academic Fringe Festival is an exciting concoction of invited talks and panel discussions around important themes of research and innovation in Computer Science. This first edition is on "Crowd Computing and Human-Centered AI". The series features prominent researchers and practitioners, whose work has made fundamental contributions in these fields.

Calling this collection of academic events "The Academic Fringe Festival" is an ode to the story of the eight theatre companies which turned up uninvited at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and performed on the fringe of the event. Over the years, such acts gained popularity and gradually snowballed into what is now the world's largest arts festival, the "Edinburgh Fringe Festival". Our aim is not to create the world's largest academic festival, but to create a forum for open, accessible, and inspiring dissemination of knowledge from renowned scientists across the globe.

The Academic Fringe Festival is free of cost and open to everyone who is interested to participate. Let there be light!

The unprecedented rise in the adoption of artificial intelligence techniques in many contexts is concomitant with shortcomings of such technology with respect to robustness, interpretability, usability, and trustworthiness. Crowd computing offers a viable means to engage a large number of human participants in data related tasks and in user studies. In the context of overcoming the computational and interactional challenges facing the current generation of AI systems, recent work has shown how crowd computing can be leveraged to either debug noisy training data in machine learning systems, understand which machine learning models are more congruent to human understanding in particular tasks, or to advance our understanding of how AI systems can influence human behavior.