From August 27 to 31 Bielefelds Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) holds its annual international Summer School for PhD students. Under this year's title of "Verbal and Non-Verbal Interaction: From experiment to Implementation" young researchers from fields as diverse as cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, neurobiology, sports, computer science and robotics will exchange on the overarching theme of interaction.

The CITEC Summer School combines small group workshops on practical, experimental and theoretical issues with a series of plenary lectures by internationally renowned speakers: Martha Alibali (University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA), Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire, UK), Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University, Japan), Katja Liebal (FU Berlin), Ivan Toni (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and Herbert Clark (Stanford University, USA)

The CITEC Summer School 2012 adresses questions about mechanisms of communicative behavior and the emergence of understanding in interaction from the perspectives of experimental psychology, computational modeling, gesture studies, animal communication and human-machine interactions. The main focus is on the decoding of gestures and facial expressions, dialogue coordination, control of joint attention and asymmetric communication. In short: What makes natural communication as efficient and how can artificial communication be improved?

The vision of CITEC is to create interactive tools that can be operated easily and intuitively so that future technology can be fit more seamlessly into daily human life. In order to accomplish this, such technology needs to be endowed with cognitive capabilities, and so part of CITEC's mission is the study of fundamental architectural principles of cognitive interaction. This goal can only be achieved through intensive interdisciplinary collaboration. The series of annual summer schools, therefore, aims to promote discussion and the exchange of ideas among researchers from a wide range of disciplines.