Social Cognitive Systems Group

Mission

Modern A.I. systems excel at many tasks but lack essential capabilities for interacting and cooperating with humans and other agents. We investigate how A.I. systems can attain the level of cognitive, communicative and cooperative abilities that is required for successful (proto-)social interaction, human-agent collaboration, and even teamwork. Our research joins methods from A.I., Cognitive Science and Human-Agent/Robot Interaction. We study human cooperative and communicative behavior in order to develop A.I. models and systems with capabilities such as online Theory of Mind, social signal understanding, predicting others, planning joint actions, or communicating with language and other modalities in situated dialog. We bring them to bear in socially assistive robots, embodied conversational agents or collaborative A.I. agents that enable humans and agents to interact and cooperate effectively in educational, workplace or home scenarios.