[Talk] Robots as Social Agents: Between Construct and Reality (Brigitte Krenn, OFAI)

The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) welcomes visitors to a virtual lecture by Dr. Brigitte Krenn, "Robots as Social Agents: Between Construct and Reality (Brigitte Krenn, OFAI)".

The talk will be held on Wednesday, 13 July at 18:30 CEST. Connection details:

Abstract: As soon as we humans encounter other agents, be it our pet animals or robots we collaborate with, we cannot help but act socially and interpret our vis-à-vis as social agents. This is because we are trained as social beings from the beginning of our lifes. We have learned to interpret nonverbal signals sent by our fellow humans as communicative cues, including facial expressions, gestures and body postures, the direction of eye gaze, as well as proximity relations. Being who we are, we tend to overestimate and misinterpret current robots and AI systems regarding their communicative intents. The talk will address this phenomenon from a perspective of human communication and present examples from a selection of OFAI's robotics research projects, studying human–robot interaction in different application contexts.

Speaker biography: Brigitte Krenn is Deputy Director of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). She has worked in natural language processing and AI since 1990. Her overall research interest lies in understanding and computationally modelling human language capability. On the one hand, she focuses on the development and application of core language technology combining linguistic analysis with state-of-the-art deep learning and data science based approaches to text and speech processing. On the other hand, she works on understanding and modelling multi-modal behaviour of communicating agents (humans and artificial agents), including language learning and understanding on robots inspired by results from research on human cognition. She is board member of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASAI) where she heads the Working Group on Natural Language Processing.