Welcome to the Sociable Agents Group

We explore how technical systems can turn into intuitive, socially adept interaction partners. To this end, we study the behavioral and cognitive processes that underlie human face-to-face communication, and we develop methods to synthesize such abilities in machines. We are particularly interested in models that enable human-like multimodality, adaptativity, and cooperation in dyamic conversational or task-based interaction. Using 3D virtual humans or humanoid robots we apply and evaluate those models for novel human-machine interaction scenarios and experiments.

Check out our current research projects here!

News [archive]

Paper on our spreading activation model of the semantic coordination of speech and gesture accepted at CogSci 2013 for oral presentation. We will also present our work there at a symposium on "Embodied Approaches to Interpersonal Coordination" organized by Rick Dale.
A chapter on automatic and strategic interpersonal alignment of gestures to appear in the book "Towards a new theory of communication" to be published by John Benjamins.
Hendrik’s and Stefan’s paper ‘Co-constructing Grounded Symbols – Feedback and Incremental Adaptation in Human–Agent Dialogue’ is now published in ‘Künstliche Intelligenz’ (preprint-pdf).
Stefan to give a keynote at ICMI 2013.
Talks on cognitive models of embodied communication with speech and gesture at Tübingen University and on intra- and interpersonal coordination in social interaction at the MPI for Biol. Kybernetik, Tübingen.
We will be moving again. This time to the new FBIIS building (around June).
Herwin's paper "Multimodal plan representation for adaptable BML scheduling" (with D. Reidsma, J. Zwiers) published in Journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
As of Oct 2012, Stefan Kopp is president of the German Cognitive Science Society (GK)
Joint paper with Prof. Nicole Krämer (U. Duisburg-Essen) on the effects of smiling in artificial agents accepted by the Int. Journal of Human-Computer Studies