Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council

The ISTC team belongs to a group including several researchers and collaborators with different backgrounds (cognitive science, computer science, cognitive and social psychology, communication) and experience in the study of cognitive social systems and the development of multi-agent interactive systems. One aspect of this experience is the creation of a basic ontology for describing mental attitudes for social interaction in human and artificial systems along with the enrichment of BDI models with anticipatory capacities (expectations, predictions) and normative reasoning (values, obligation, norms). A basic ontology has been developed involving the description of building blocks like power, dependence, social cooperation, social exchange, trust, goal adoption and normative goals. Another peculiar aspect of this experience is the cognitive modelling of complex emotions such as envy, shame, anxiety, pity, sense of guilt. The group is developing architectures for intelligent systems (integrating motivation and cognition with affect), and simulations of multi-agent systems and Embodied Conversational Agents. The group is involved in European research Projects on related subjects: ALFEBIITE (on the theory and modelling of Trust); MindRaces - COGNITIVE SYSTEMS (on anticipation, expectation, surprise, future directed emotions); ISLE and MAGICSTER (on the annotation of multimodal data and the construction of Embodied Believable Agents).

Cristiano Castelfranchi is a professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Siena, Department of Communication Science, and director of ISTC-CNR, in Roma. A cognitive scientist with a background in linguistics and psychology, he is active in the Multi-Agent Systems, the Social Simulation, and the Cognitive Science communities. Fellow of ECCAI (European Coordinating Committee for AI); program chair of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-2002); chair of several international workshops in these fields (like ATAL and "Trust and Deception in Artificial Societies"), and advisory member of several international conferences and societies (like Cognitive Science; IFMAS). Participating in a number of research networks under the European IV and V Framework. Research fields of interest include: cognitive agent theory and architecture; multi-agent systems; agent-based social simulation; social cognition and emotions, with special focus on trust and deception. He published 4 books in English, and 11 in Italian; more than 200 conference and journal articles on cognitive, computational and formal-theoretical models of social interaction and social mind. Invited speaker at IJCAI'97 (and several other conferences and workshops in AI and cognitive studies); member of the editorial board of Autonomous Agents and MAS, Cognitive Science Quarterly, the MIT CogNet.

Emanuela Magno Caldognetto is Research Director at the ISTC-CNR, Section “Phonetics and Dialectology” of Padua. A former National Chair of the Experimental Phonetic Group of Associazione Italiana di Acustica, she has worked on the production and perception of articulatory movements, coarticulation, prosody and intonation, planning of multimodal communication (co-production of gesture and speech, speech and visual prosody), phonological representation in the slips of the tongue (with W.Dressler, University of Wien), vocal transmission of emotions and attitudes in different languages (with S.Kori, University of Osaka), and she pioneered the study and construction of Talking Faces in Italy, with P.Cosi (ISTC-CNR), C.Pelachaud (IUT, Paris 8) and I.Poggi (University Roma 3). She has chaired a number of national research groups in research projects on coverbal gestures, annotation of multimodal corpora, visual and auditory features of emotional speech, multimodal interfaces for ICT in life-long learning, and she was a subcontractor of the “MagiCster” EU Project on Embodied Believable Agents.

Maria Miceli, a social psychologist with a background in philosophy, is a researcher at the ISTC-CNR. Her research activity focuses on the cognitive aspects of social mechanisms and processes and their interplay with motivational and emotional components, and on modelling architectures of intelligent autonomous agents endowed with social capabilities. Topics of interest include: cognitive and motivational aspects of emotions; kinds and processes of evaluation; values; self-esteem and defense strategies; processes of belief and goal invalidation: disappointment, discouragement, and loss of motivation; the violation of expectations and the associated sense of injustice. She is coordinator of a CNR project on “Cognitive Agent Architecture: motivational and dynamic aspects”, and has been involved in several national and international projects, and in the organization of national and international workshops and conferences. She has published various books in social psychology and several papers in international journals in social psychology, cognitive modelling, and distributed artificial intelligence. She won the "Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour" Theory Prize for 1992.

Isabella Poggi is a professor of General Psychology and Psychology of Communication at the University “Roma Tre”. She has published books and papers on Multimodal communication (gestures, facial expression, gaze, touch, music, Embodied Conversational Agents), Pragmatics and Psychology of Communication (interjections, deception, persuasion), Psychology of Emotions (guilt, shame, humiliation, pity, enthusiasm, emotions at work, communication of emotions). She is among the founders of the International Society for Gesture Studies and in the board of the journal Gesture. She collaborates with C.Pelachaud (IUT, Paris 8), E.Magno Caldognetto (ISTC-CNR) and F.de Rosis (University of Bari) in the analysis of multimodal communication and the construction of Embodied Agents, and with C.Castelfranchi and M.Miceli in the AI group of ISTC-CNR, particularly in projects on emotion, persuasion, social influence and communication.

Francesca Giardini is a PhD student in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Siena. She is presently a visiting student at the Institut de Science Cognitives of Lyon. She took a degree in Communication Sciences in 2002 with a dissertation on “The Emotional Decision-Maker. A proposal of an integrated model of the relationship between emotion and decision-making in everyday context”. Her topics of interest include: implicit communication, emotions in decision making, and neural correlates of emotions in economic decisions.

Giorgio Merola is a PhD Student in Psychology of Cognition, Physiology and Personality at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He graduated in Psychology in 2001 with a dissertation on “Nonverbal communication in school”. He is presently working on the teacher’s multimodal communication and its direct and emotion-mediated effects on the pupils’ comprehension and memory, on the annotation of multimodal data, and on the psychology of sport and its cognitive and emotional aspects.