University of Hertfordshire

The interdisciplinary Adaptive Systems Research Group, led by Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn is situated within the Department of Computer Science, and comprises eight permanent academic staff and over 20 doctoral and postdoctoral students. It carries out research in various aspects of Embodied Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Socially Intelligent Agents, and Artificial Life. One of the key research areas, leaded by Dr. Lola Cañamero, is emotion modelling for artefacts, focusing on the following topics: architectures based on emotions and motivations for decision-making (behaviour selection) in autonomous agents and robots; emotion-based learning of affordances in autonomous robots; the evolution of emotional expression and behaviour in artificial agents; the development of affective bonds in artificial social groups; the role of affect in imitation; and expressive robotic heads for the study of emotion development and social interactions. Related aspects of research into socially intelligent agents led by Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn include empathy, learning by imitation, autobiographical memories, social robots, and narrative intelligence. Externally funded projects relevant to HUMAINE include VICTEC (EU FP5-IST), investigating the use of empathic virtual characters to remedy bullying in schools, and AURORA (UK EPSRC), exploring the use of robots as social partners for autism therapy. Associated to the group is an Interactive Systems and Robotics laboratory that is particularly suited for experiments involving physical robots; the laboratory is currently equipped with small-sized robots of various types (e.g., Khepera, LEGO Mindstorms, Koala). Dr Dittrich heads the Experimental Psychology Unit in the Psychology Department and collaborates on projects in the area described above.

Dr Lola Cañamero is Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Hertfordshire. She received a BA and MA in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid, and a PhD in Computer Science (1995) from the University of Paris-XI. She worked as a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1995/96) and at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1997), and as researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish Scientific Research Council, CSIC (1998-2000). Her research lies in the areas of biologically-inspired emotion modelling for autonomous and social agents (both robotic and synthetic), adaptive behaviour, and human-robot and human-computer interaction. She has organized six international symposia and workshops on the topic of emotion modelling in Europe and the USA since 1998, and been member of the program committee and invited speaker at numerous international and national conferences. She is author or co-author of over 60 scientific papers, coeditor of the book Socially Intelligent Agents: Creating relationships with computers and robots (Kluwer Academic Publishers), currently editing (with Ruth Aylett) the book Animating Expressive Characters for Social Interaction (John Benjamins Publishing Company), guest editor (with Paolo Petta) of the special issue of the Cybernetics and Systems Journal "Grounding Emotions in Adaptive Systems," and member of the Editorial Board of the journal Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems (John Benjamins).

Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at University Hertfordshire in England where she coordinates the Adaptive Systems Research Group. She has a background in Biology, Artificial Intelligence and Behaviour-Based Robotics. Her main areas of expertise are Robot-Human Interaction, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Robotics and Social Robotics. She has pioneered research in robot social learning and imitation, and the study of robots in autism therapy. She has edited 10 special journal issues on related subjects in different international journals, and published more than 100 research articles. She is editor of "Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology" (John Benjamins Publishers, 2000) and co-editor of "Imitation in Animals and Artifacts" (MIT Press, 2002), and "Socially Intelligent Agents - Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots" (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). She is Associate Editor of Adaptive Behavior, and on the Board of Advisory Editors of the International Journal of Cognition and Technology: Co-existence, Convergence, Co-evolution (IJCT), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Interaction Studies Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems.

Dr Winand Dittrich is Reader in Experimental Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. He received his PhD (Dr.rer.nat.) in Zoology, Psychology and Biochemistry from the Philipps-University Marburg (Germany). He has held various Research & Teaching Fellowships (Berlin (FU), Bochum, St.Andrews, Exeter) as well as Honorary Research Fellowships (Exeter, Imperial College School of Medicine London, Hertfordshire NHS Trust) and has been with the University of Hertfordshire since 1992. In the last years he has reviewed for 20 different international learned journals, publishers, grant bodies (incl. Science, APA journals and Psychological Science, NSF, BBSRC, ESRC). His research concentrates on the visual perception of emotions from human body movement and intentionality as well as causality perception. Studying the evolution of signal systems, e.g. in animals and machines, strengthens this line of research. He has also significantly contributed to the understanding of the cognitive and emotional control of simple actions, as beneficially applicable to a new generation of machines.

Dr René te Boekhorst obtained his PhD at the University of Utrecht, in The Netherlands. His dissertation was on the social ethology and behavioural ecology of great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas) based on field data and individual oriented models. He moved to Switzerland, where he worked on collective robotics at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich, leaded by Prof. Rolf Pfeifer. Currently he is Senior Lecturer at the Computer Science Department of the University of Hertfordshire, where he is involved in the application of ethological methods of statistical analysis to behavioural robotics, social robotics and human-robot interaction. His research interest is in the analysis of behaviour of natural and artificial systems, non-linear time series analysis of complex (artificial, biological) systems, and in dynamical systems modelling of motivation and other affective phenomena.