Welcome to the Sociable Agents Group
We study how intelligent systems can join and assist humans naturally. Using 3D virtual humans or humanoid robots, we try to endow machines with features and mechanisms of human cognition and communication in order to make them more conversational, adaptive and companionable. This research links empirical studies of human communication and cognitive modeling with the development of interactive systems for novel human-machine interaction scenarios, in which these systems can be evaluated and applied for experimentation.
Current research projects focus on: generation, understanding and alignment of socio-communicative behavior (mainly speech and gesture), grounding and mentalizing in dialogue, inter-speaker coordination and adaptation.
News [archive]
- We will run an invited symposium on "Modeling Cognition in Communication" at KogWis 2012
- Skype talk "Talking hands" by Stefan to the Global CoE Workshop at Osaka
- Ulf's paper "Low latency recognition and reproduction of natural gesture trajectories" nominated for Best Student Paper Award at ICPRAM 2012.
- Kirsten Bergmann to get the Dissertation Award of the westfälisch-lippische Universitätsgesellschaft!
- Stefan to give a plenary talk at the next year's 5th conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies
- Special Corner: Cognitive Robotics (edited by S. Kopp and J. Steil) appeared in Cognitive Processing
- Stefan and Kirsten gave a presentation at the Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung at LMU München
- Elmar Bienek joined the group to work in the SFB B1 project - welcome!
- Full paper on "Low latency recognition and reproduction of natural gesture trajectories" accepted at ICPRAM