How can we coherently coordinate language, perception, and action so that cooperation between humans and technical systems takes place in natural efficiency?

Evolution has brought about human communication as the most efficient, robust, and flexible means of coordinating action between agents. In situated communication, humans may interact while exposed to time pressure, the bottleneck of the medium, and the uncertainty of available information, but nevertheless cooperatively achieve a huge variety of divergent actions.

Understanding the principles of communication as well as modeling and implementing them is a challenge that CITEC will tackle in a joint effort of linguists, psycholinguists, and computer scientists. Apart from offering a major step in adaptable, personalized human-computer interaction, this implies a more seamless integration of communicative building blocks of CIT ranging from augmented reality-based assistance devices to adaptive virtual agents in web technology.

Research Topics

• In the subarea Coordinating Actions the focus lies on ways of sensing, expressing and sharing intentions as well as coordinating activity by using situation-adequate multimodal signs.
• Communication Economy focuses on means to gain efficient and flexible behavior by referring to different levels of contexts.
• Embodied Cooperative Systems is the area in which we integrate insights obtained from our research in order to implement and evaluate communicative interaction technologies specifically from virtual agents to robot systems and communities thereof.

Coordinator

• Prof. Dr. Stefan Kopp