Welcome to the Sociable Agents Group

We develop methods for making technical systems intuitive and pleasant to interact with. Using 3D virtual characters or humanoid robots we study how machines can be endowed with advanced features of human cognition and communication needed to make them more conversational, cooperative and companionable. To this end we combine empirical study in human communication, cognitive/A.I. modeling, and the development of novel human-machine interaction scenarios in which these systems are applied, evaluated, and exploited for experimentation.

Check out our current research projects here!

News [archive]

Papers accepted at CogSci 2012 (on gesture alignment), the Listening Talker Workshop (on cues of inattentiveness), the SMIAE workshop (on assistance for user with special needs), and INLG 2012 (on incremental referring expressions).
Stefan will give a talk on multimodal prosody at the workshop on "Dynamic Modeling of Articulation an Prosodic Structure" in Cologne.
Mahas Poster won the Poster Session Award at IK 2012. :)
Stefan and Kirsten will give a talk at the Max-Planck-Institute, Nijmegen.
Stefan will give a talk on assistive systems and the VASA project to the Fachtag Altenhilfe organized by Bethel Foundation.
Hendrik will present the paper “Prosodic characteristics of feedback expressions in distracted and non-distracted listeners” at the ‘Listening Talker’ workshop in Edinburgh (joint work with Bielefeld's Phonetics and Phonology Group).
Radio Bielefeld featured our agent BILLIE and our project in cooperation with Bethel
Ulf's paper "Low latency recognition and reproduction of natural gesture trajectories" nominated for Best Student Paper Award at ICPRAM 2012.
Kirsten Bergmann to get the Dissertation Award of the westfälisch-lippische Universitätsgesellschaft!
Stefan to give a plenary talk at the next year's 5th conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies
Special Corner: Cognitive Robotics (edited by S. Kopp and J. Steil) appeared in Cognitive Processing