Author Archives: scsadmin
Mental models in collaborative interactive reinforcement learning
This project is part of the Research Cluster CINEMENTAS (“Collaborative Intelligence Based on Mental Models of Assistive Systems”) funded by a major international technology company. We investigate the role of mental models for interactive reinforcement learning, according to which learning is seen as a dynamic collaborative process in which the trainer and learner together trying to figure out best action policy. We study how learning of a cognitive system can be sped up when the human trainer gives evaluative, informative feedback based on mental models of the system and the learning process, and the learner uses this feedback to build a (potentially simplified) model of the task domain and to shape its policy.
Development of iconic co-speech gesturing in preschool children (EcoGest)
This projects aims to provide a detailed account of the development of iconic gesturing and its integration with speech in different communicative genres. We will study pre-school children at 4 to 5 years of age to investigate their speech-accompanying iconic gesture use and to develop a computational cognitive model of their development. We apply qualitative and quantitative methods to study children’s speech-gesture behavior and to evaluate our findings with computational cognitive modeling in terms of the following aspects: (1) forms of iconic gesturing, (2) positions of gestures, (3) semantic coordination of speech and gesture, (4) packaging of information.