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

[Tristan Miller]

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: https://www.ofai.at/events/2022-07-13krenn

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.

--
Dr.-Ing. Tristan Miller, Research Scientist
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, 1010 Vienna, Austria | Tel: +43 1 5336112 12
https://logological.org/ | https://punderstanding.ofai.at/