PLEASE NOTE:
- This seminar is IN PERSON ONLY in room RSM 2.28, Level 2, Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London’s South Kensington campus.
- Refreshments and networking will take place after this seminar in RSM 3.24.
GUEST SPEAKER:
Professor Agnieszka Wykowska, Head of the Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction Unit at the Italian Institute of Technology.
TALK TITLE:
Human Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction
ABSTRACT:
As modern technology advances, we are designing increasingly sophisticated tools to support and assist humans. However, it is crucial to not only focus on the technology but also address the mechanisms of human cognition during the use of the technology. It is those mechanisms that will eventually determine whether the technology is efficacious and well-accepted by users.
In my lab, we study the mechanisms of human cognition in the interaction between humans and humanoid robots. With cognitive neuroscience methods, we seek to understand how attention operates during collaborative tasks with the robots, how the human users attune to the robot during joint action, whether they experience a sense of agency when teleoperating the robot and a sense of joint agency when they are engaged in a shared task with the robot. In this talk, I will present results from my lab related to the above topics that have been obtained with the use of cognitive neuroscience methods (EEG and eye tracking) in human-humanoid interaction protocols. I will then discuss how these research questions (and respective findings) can be translated from fundamental research in human-robot interaction to applications of robotics for healthcare.
BIOGRAPHY:
Professor Agnieszka Wykowska is the head of the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Genoa, Italy. She is also the Coordinator of the Center for Human Technologies, at the IIT.
Her background is Cognitive Neuroscience (Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU) in 2006). She obtained a PhD in Psychology (2008) also from the LMU. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting grant “InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement” and in 2024, she was awarded the ERC Proof-of-Concept grant “RONIN: Robot Training Independence”. She is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics. Between 2022 and 2024 she served in the role of President of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). She is also member of the Board of Directors of the Association of ERC Grantees (AERG). In 2023 she was awarded the Hans-Fischer Senior Fellowship from the TUM Institute of Advanced Studies to lead a research group “Human Cognition in Neuroengineering”.
Her research foci are interdisciplinary, as she combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with other humans and with technology.