Robots as Social Agents: Between Construct and Reality (OFAI Lecture by Brigitte Krenn)
Channel: Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI)
Date: 2022-09-13

Robots as Social Agents: Between Construct and Reality
Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn, OFAI
13 July 2022

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.