Professor of Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn

This page was updated on 3 June 2005. It is a personal document and does only reflect my own opinions.

I am Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science (Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences) at University of Hertfordshire, where I am a coordinator of the Adaptive Systems Research Group. Main areas of my research are Socially Intelligent Agents and Artificial Life, you can find out more about it on this homepage. I am former member of the Department of Biological Cybernetics at University of Bielefeld, Germany, 1990-1993, and AI-Lab at GMD, Sankt Augustin, Germany, 1993-1996, and VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Brussels, Belgium, until end of 1996. From January 1997 to April 2000 Lecturer, Department of Cybernetics at University of Reading, United Kingdom.

I was General Chair of the AISB 2005 Convention: Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots, and Agents:, 12-15 April 2005, University of Hertfordshire, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, UK. This was the larget AISB convention ever hosting 10 symposia relevant to the general theme and attracted 299 participants. I co-chaired (with Rene te Boekhorst) the symposium Robot Companions: Hard Problems and Open Challenges in Robot-Human Interaction and was programme co-chair (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts - chair is Yiannis Demiris.

New Interdisciplinary Journal: Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, John Benjamins Publishing Company. Editors-in-Chief: Kerstin Dautenhahn and Harold Gouzoules.

Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, Cambridge, Mass., USA: MIT Press, 2002, guest editors Kerstin Dautenhahn and Chrystopher L. Nehaniv. See the table of contents.

Socially Intelligent Agents - Creating relationships with computers and robots, edited by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Alan Bond, Lola Cañamero, Bruce Edmonds, Kluwer Academic Publishers. See the description of content (with ordering information) and table of contents (pdf document).

The book Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology which I edited can now be ordered from John Benjamins Publishing Company. See the description and table of contents.

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My Research:

My research has been funded by EPSRC, the Nuffield Foundation, the University of Reading Research Endowment Trust Fund, and IST. Since March 2001 the European project VICTEC (Virtual ICT using Empathic Characters in Schools) has started, collaborating institutions are University of Salford, INESC, University of Bamberg and Autor. The ambitious goal of the project is to develop an interactive virtual environment where through “story-telling” children learn how to cope with bullying. Here at University of Hertfordshire the team is a joint Computer Science/Psychology group, including myself and Prof. Dieter Wolke (Bristol), and Sarah Woods (Research Fellow and main investigator of the project). Since March 2003 the spin-off Elvis (E-Learning with Virtual Interactive Synthetic Characters) is running, a European ASIA IT&C project. Sarah Woods, myself and Wan Ching Ho (PhD student) are part of the UH team. Partners are University of Salford, Zhejiang University, Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon and University of Hertfordshire. Since January 2004 Cogniron (Cognitive Robot Companion), a FP 6 Integrated Project is running for four years. The UH team involves several members of the Adaptive Systems Research Group. Since September 2004 I am involved in the European FP 6 project Robot-Cub, project in the area of developmental robotics.

I am Associate Editor of the Journal of Adaptive Behavior. I am member of the Board of Governors of the Cognitive Technology Society (CTS), and on the Board of Advisory Editors of the International Journal of Cognition and Technology: Co-existence, Convergence, Co-evolution (IJCT), Official Organ of the Cognitive Technology Society (John Benjamins Publishers, starting from January 2002). I am member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Industrial Robot, MCB University Press. See below for my other academic activities. 

My research interest in socially intelligent agents (and mechanisms like social learning/imitation, story-telling, interactive emergence, robot-human interaction, mindreading) led to the project AURORA (Autonomous robotic platform as a remedial tool for children with autism) which aims to 1) develop a novel human-robot interface, and 2) make a contribution to use mobile robots as rehabilitation and teaching devices. 

My research goals are the investigation of social intelligence and individual interactions in groups of autonomous agents, including humans and other animals, software agents and robots. This includes different kind of "social interactions" and cooperation, including movements, communication, the role of "internal states" and memory (in particular "story-telling" as a central element of human remembering and dialogue), and embodiment for intelligent behaviour, and the way other agents interpret the behaviour and "intentions" of human-made artifacts. 

My research background and interests are very interdisciplinary and I hope that I can merge different kinds of knowledge and methodologies in order to produce interesting artifacts. They will never be as complex and beautiful as natural living systems, but they should behave in a way which makes them useful and acceptable for humans, acceptable for me. These systems will not be copies of humans or animals, they will always be different, because of the different organization of the material their bodies consist of. But they should behave in a way which is compatible to humans, I want them to be integrated in human society, a "multi-species" society. I am thinking hard about how to implement the phenomenological dimension of social intelligence and understanding in concrete computer programs and robot designs. Body and mind emerged from the same kind of matter, they are two aspects of the same complex organization of material. That's my conception of embodiment. And social understanding and communication is rooted in the "empathic" re-experiencing occurring between such systems. That's in short my "philosophy of thinking" which I'm describing in more detail in my papers. But it's not sufficient to think out concepts, these systems have to be built! That's what keeps me busy. 

My current and future robotic interests also include explicit communication ("language" in terms of communicative signals, grounded in embodied agents and social interactions), studies on "body language" (non-verbal communication between agents, focusing on synchronization and coordination of movements for communicative purposes), social learning mechanisms supporting the emergence of "individuality" and "autobiographic agents". All this will be centered around the basic artificial life idea on studying the development and emergence (yes, I dare to use this term) of (social) complexity involving artificial matter and agents. 

With respect to robot-human interaction I think in terms of building robots as "friendly" partners, showing interesting behaviours and/or dynamic types of movement: robots as toys to entertain people and help handicapped children to relate to the environment, see project AURORA

My personal vision about robot-human relationships is described  here.

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Contact details:

Prof. Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn
Adaptive Systems Research Group
The University of Hertfordshire
Department of Computer Science
College Lane
Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
United Kingdom

E-mail: K.Dautenhahn AT herts.ac.uk

Fax: +44-1707-284-303
Tel: +44-1707-284-333

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Some of my academic activities in 2006:

• I am in the Senior Program Committee of HRI 2006, the 1st Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction March 2-3, 2006, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Some of my academic activities in 2005:

• General chair of AISB 2005 Convention, 12-15 April 2005, University of Hertfordshire, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, UK.
• Programme co-chair of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts at AISB 2005
• co-organizer of symposum Robot Companions: Hard Problems and Open Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction at AISB2005
• Organizing committee of Towards Social Mechanisms of Android Science, (at CogSci 2005), Stresa, Italy, 25-26 July 2005
• Invited keynote speaker at IVA2005, The 5th International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, September 12-14, 2005 Kos, Greece
• Invited keynote speaker at AMiRE2005, The 3rd International Symposium on Autonomous Minirobots for Research and Edutainment (AMiRE 2005), September 20-22, 2005, Awara-Spa, Fukui, JAPAN
• Organising (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) a special session on "Robot Companions" at IEEE Ro-man2005, 14th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 13-15, 2005 Marriott at Vanderbilt 2555 West End Ave. Nashville, TN 37203 USA
• Reviewer for IJCAI 2005, Nineteenth Interactional Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 30 July -5 August 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland
• Co-organizer of a special session on Human-Robot Interaction CIRA2005, 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation - Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland - June 27-30, 2005
• presenter of half-day tutorial on "Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction" at CIRA2005, 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation - Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland - June 27-30, 2005
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation: Robots get closer to Humans, ICRA 2005, April 18-22, 2005, Barcelona, Spain
  • IEEE Ro-man2005, 14th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 13-15, 2005 Marriott at Vanderbilt 2555 West End Ave. Nashville, TN 37203 USA
  • IEEE Ro-man 2005, 4th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 13-15, 2005, Marriott at Vanderbilt, Nashville, USA
  • The Fourth International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-05), Osaka, Japan at INTEX Osaka, July 19-21, 2005
  • CIRA2005, 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation - Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland - June 27-30, 2005
  • Epirob2005, Fifth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, 22-24 July 2005, Nara, Japan
  • IVA'05, The 5th International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, September 12-14, 2005 Kos, Greece
  • ECAL2005, The VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, September 5-9, 2005, Canterbury, England
  • The 5th International working conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2005), September 12-14, 2005 Kos, Greece
  • Creating bonds with Humanoids, a workshop at AAMAS 2005 (25-29 July 2005), Utrecht University, the Netherlands

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Some of my academic activities in 2004:

• Invited speaker at Third International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design, SID 2004, July 3-5, 2004, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands
• Invited speaker at IEEE Ro-man 2004, 13th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication September 20-22, 2004 Kurashiki, Okayama Japan.
• Invited speaker at the 10th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology, "Modeling Biology", organised by Gerd Muller and Luciano da Fontura Costa at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
• Invited speaker at BNAIC2004, 16th Belgian-Dutch Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Groningen, The Netherlands, 21-22 October, 2004.
• Invited speaker at IFIP-WCC, 18 th IFIP World Computer Congress, Topical Day on Social Robots: Challenges for Machine Intelligence, organised by Georges Giralt and Raja Chatila, Toulouse France 22-27 August 2004
• General chair of AISB 2005 Convention, 12-15 April 2005, University of Hertfordshire, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, UK. The convention is hosted by the Adaptive Systems Research Group at University of Hertfordshire, on behalf of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB) which is the largest Artificial Intelligence Society in the United Kingdom. At the convention, I'm also co-chair (with Rene te Boekhorst) of the symposium Robot Companions: Hard Problems and Open Challenges in Robot-Human Interaction, as well as programme co-chair (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts - chair is Yiannis Demiris.
• Editing a book, together with Chrystopher Nehaniv on "Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioural, Social and Communicative Dimensions", Cambridge University Press.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • IAS-8: 8th Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, March 10-13, 2004, Amsterdam, NL
  • From Animals to Animats 8, The Eighth International Conference on the SIMULATION OF ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR (SAB'04), 13-17 July 2004, Los Angeles, USA
  • Artificial Life IX, The Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Boston, USA, 12-15 September 2004
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation: Robots get closer to Humans, ICRA 2005, April 18-22, 2005, Barcelona, Spain
  • IJCAI 2005, Nineteenth Interactional Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 30 July -5 August 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland
  • EPIROB2004, Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, August 25-27, 2004, LIRA-Lab, University of Genoa, Italy
  • ICDVRAT 2004, 5th International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies, 20-22 September 2004, New College, Oxford, UK.
  • Seventh International Workshop on: Trust in Agent Societies, to be held at Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems Conference (AAMAS 2004) July 19 (or) 20, 2004. New York, USA
  • International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment - TIDSE 2004, June 24-26 2004, Darmstadt, Germany.
  • International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL'04), San Diego, California (Salk Institute, La Jolla), October 20-22, 2004.
  • XVII Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, September 29 - October 1, 2004, São Luis, Maranhão - Brazil
  • SOAVE 2004 - SelfOrganization of AdaptiVE behavior, Ilmenau, 28.-30. September 2004

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Some of my academic activities in 2003:

• Co-organising the Second International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts. Co- organiser is Chrystopher Nehaniv. Calls for Extended Abstracts by 14th October 1998, submission Deadline 15th January 2003. The symposium runs from 7 - 11 April 2003 at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom, as part of the Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour Convention AISB'03 with the general theme of "Cognition in Machines and Animals"
• Program co-chair of the symposium Evolvability and Interaction: Evolutionary Substrates of Communication, Signaling, and Perception in the Dynamics of Social Complexity, 8-10 October 2003 London, England, U.K., as part of the EPSRC Network on Evolvability in Biological and Software Systems.
• Full day tutorial on Imitation and Social Learning in Animals and Artifacts (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) on 16th July 2003 at CIRA03, IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA'03)
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • 7th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL-2003), 14. - 17. September 2003, Dortmund, Germany, submission deadline 1^st March 2003
  • 3^rd International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, Boston, August 2003, USA
  • International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment - TIDSE 2003, March 2003, Darmstadt, Germany, submission deadline 15^th November 2002
  • TIMR 03, the fourth British Conference on Mobile Robotics, 28-29 August, 2003, UWE Bristol, UK
  • IVA2003, 15-17 September 2003, Irsee, Germany
  • First German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES'03), September 22 - 25, 2003, Erfurt, Germany, submission deadline 28^th April 2003
  • Second International Workshop on Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems: Theories and Applications (RASTA'03), 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, deadline 12th March 2003
  • 2003 IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2003), Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), October 13-17, 2003, Tianlun Dynasty Hotel, BEIJING, CHINA
  • First International Workshop on Social Life (SOLI'03),14 September, 2003, held in conjunction with ECAL 2003, the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life
  • IROS-2003 Workshop on Robot Programming by Demonstration, Friday 31st of October 2003, 12-5pm, IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems: IROS 2003, Bally's Las Vegas Hotel, USA, October 27-31, 2003

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Some of my academic activities in 2002:

• Co-organiser (with Stephen Marsh, John Meech and Lucy Nowell) of the CHI2002 workshop The Philosophy and Design of Socially Adept Technologies. 21 April 2002, Minneapolis, USA.
• Editing a book "Socially Intelligent Agents - Creating relationships with computers and robots" (co-editors Alan Bond, Lola Canamero, Bruce Edmonds), Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Bruce Edmonds and I give a half-day tutorial on "Socially Intelligent Agents" at SAB 2002, special theme: Social Embeddedness - Origins, Occurrence and Opportunities, 10th August, 2002, Edinburgh.
• Organising committee of EPSRC/BBSRC International Workshop Biologically-Inspired Robotics: The Legacy of W.Grey Walter, 14-16 August 2002, Bristol, UK
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • The 7th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-7) March 25-27, 2002, Marina del Rey, California, USA.
  • First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2002, Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna, Italy, July 15-19, 2002
  • 7th International Conference "Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, From Animals to Animats" (SAB 2002), Edinburgh (UK), August 4-10, 2002 .
  • The 4th International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies (ICDVRAT2002) 18-20 September 2002, Veszprém, Hungary.
  • Second International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics - Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systemss to be held August 10-11, 2002 in Edinburgh, UK in conjunction with SAB'02: From Animals to Animats 7.
  • Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO-2002, July 9-13, 2002, New York City, NY USA.
  • GWAL-5, 5th German Workshop on Artificial Life, Lübeck, Germany, 18. - 20. March, 2002.
  • Animating expressive characters for social interactions, Symposium of the AISB'02 Convention, Imperial College, London, UK, 2nd - 5th April, 2002
  • ICALT 2002 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, September 9-12, 2002, Kazan, Russia, submission deadline 5th April 2002
  • NILE 2, Second International Workshop on Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments, 6th to 9th August 2002, Pollock Halls, The University of Edinburgh, deadline for paper submissions 31 May 2002
  • Fifth Workshop of the UK SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS (UKMAS-2002), Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool, UK, 18-19 December 2002
  • ROMAN2002: 11th IEEE Int. Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Berlin, Germany from Sept 25-27, 2002

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Some of my academic activities in 2001

• Organising the Workshop on Robotic and Virtual Interactive Systems in Autism Therapy, 27-28 September 2001, at University of Hertfordshire.
• Invited speaker at the workshop "The future of learning", Chateau de Bagnols, France. Organisers: Luc Steels and Mario Tokoro (Sony).
• Invited speaker at the workshop "Social Robotics" Puerto Chico A, Lanzerote, Spain, June 29th to July 4th, 2001. Organisers: David McFarland and Owen Holland.
• Invited speaker at the workshop "Agent Culture: Designing Virtual Characters for a Multi-cultural World", 24-25 August 2001, Vienna. Organisers: Robert Trappl and Sabine Payr (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence).
• Editing a Special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans on Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop was 15th of December 2000. It has appeared in September 2001 as volume 31, number 5. List of contents. Guest Editor: Kerstin Dautenhahn.
• Editing a Special Issue of Artificial Life (with Thomas Uthmann and Daniel Polani) on Evolution of Sensors in Nature, Hardware and Simulation. Submission deadline 15th of September 2000. It has appeared as volume 7, number 2, 2001. List of contents.
• Editing a book (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) on "Imitation in Animals and Artifacts", MIT Press, to appear Spring 2002.
• Program Chair of CT2001, The Fourth International Conference on Cognitive Technology: INSTRUMENTS OF MIND (CT2001), to be held Monday 6th - Thursday 9th August, 2001 at University of Warwick, United Kingdom. The proceedings (Springer LNAI 2117) can be accessed here.
• Organizing Committee of First International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, September 17-18, 2001, Lund, Sweden. Submission deadline 15th April 2001.
• Organizing committee of Emotional and Intelligent II: The tangled knot of social cognition, AAAI Fall Symposium, Sea Crest Conference Center, North Falmouth, MA, November 2-4, 2001, submission deadline March 30, 2001.
• Invited speaker and participant "Social Robotics", 3rd UWE ITERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON BIOLOGICAL ROBOTICS, Puerto Chico A, Playa Blanca, Lanzerote, Canaries, Spain, June 28th to July 5th, 2001
• Organizing committee of JSAI- Synsophy International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design, May 21-22, 2001 / Matsue, Shimane, Japan, submission deadline 31st January 2001.
• Organizing committee of Evolution of Sensors in Nature, Hardware, and Simulation (with Daniel Polani, Thomas Uthmann), workshop at GECCO2001, submission deadline 1st March 2001.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • TIMR 2001, Third British conference on intelligent mobile robotics and autonomous systems, April 5th, 2001 at the University of Manchester.
  • IAT2001, Second Asian-Pacific Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, 23-26 October 2001, Maebashi City, Japan, submission deadline 20th March 2001.
  • Member of Special Program Committee for Agents, Adaptive Behavior and Agents at GECCO 2001.
  • EWLR-2001, 9th European Workshop on Learning Robots, September 9th and 10th 2001, Prague, Czech Republic, Organized just before ECAL-2001, submission deadline 30th April 2001.
  • IVA2001: Third International Workshop on INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL AGENTS, September 11-12, 2001, Madrid, Spain, deadline for paper submissions 11th May 2001.
  • AEMAS'01: Adaptability and Embodiment using Multi-Agent Systems, Workshop at ACAI '2001, Prague, CZ., July 7th, 2001, submission deadline 15 April, 2001.
  • UKMAS 2001, Fourth Workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems St Catherine's College, Oxford University 13th-14th December, 2001, submission deadline 28th September 2001

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Some of my academic activities in 2000: 

• Chair of Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in The Loop, AAAI Fall Symposium, 3-5 November, Sea Crest Resort, North Falmouth, MA, USA. Submission deadline 29th March 2000.
• Invited speaker at Strategies for Implementing Large Scale Emergent Systems, University of Wales, Cardiff. The Workshop is part of the Emergent Computing Network. Submission Deadline 15 March 2000.
• Invited speaker at Symposium "Artificial Mind ­ Artificial Soul" (organised by Prof. Dietrich Dörner, Bamberg) at XXVII International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, 23-28 July, Sweden. Title of the talk "Making Friends with Robots: An Artificial Life Perspective on Socially Intelligent Agents".
• Invited speaker at conference "Perspectives on Adaptivity and Learning", 25-29 September, 2000 at Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld, Germany.
• Invited speaker at ifu's open space, International Women's University, 18 August 2000, Hannover, Germany, Theme: "intelligent beings - being intelligent". Title of my talk: "artificial life - "life like" artifacts and robotic friends".
• Giving a half-day tutorial "On Minds and Agents: Social Intelligence in Animals and Artifacts" at Autonomous Agents 2000, Fourth International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents 2000), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, June 3 - June 7 2000. Deadline for electronic title page submission: 24th October 1999.
• Giving a two-hour tutorial Socially Intelligent Agents - From Animals to Animats within the Joint Tutorial Programme of SAB2000: 6th Int'l Conf. on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior and PPSN2000: 6th Int'l Conf. on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature, Paris, France, Sunday 17th September 2000
• Co-organiser (with Thomas Uthmann and Daniel Polani) of Evolution of Sensors in Nature, Hardware and Simulation, Bird-of-a-feather Workshop at GECCO 2000, submission deadline 1st March 2000.
• Co-editing (with Bruce Edmonds) a Special Issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) on Starting from Society - the application of social analogies to computational systems . Submission deadline is 1st of September 2000.
• Co-editing Imitation in Natural and Artificial Systems, special journal issue of Cybernetics and Systems. Co-editor: Chrystopher Nehaniv, Taylor & Francis
• Co-chair (with Bruce Edmonds) of AISB Symposium Starting from Society - the application of social analogies to computational systems, a symposium at, "Time for AI and Society" 2000 Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB-00), 17th-20th April 2000, University of Birmingham, England, submission deadline is 6th January 2000.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS, The Sixth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2000), 11 - 15 September 2000, Paris, France, deadline for paper submission: 19 Feb 2000.
  • GECCO-2000, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2000), July 8 - 12, 2000, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, deadline for paper submissions: 26th January 2000.
  • 2000 Workshop on Interactive Robotics and Entertainment (WIRE-2000) in cooperation with AAAI, April 30 - May 1, 2000, The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, submission deadline is 15th December 1999.
  • MABS2000 @ ICMAS-2000, The Second Workshop on Multi Agent Based Simulation, one day in period 7-9 July, 2000, Boston, MA, USA. Submission deadline 15 February 2000.
  • UKMAS-2000 Preliminary Call For Papers Third Workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems, St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, OX1 3UJ 14th - 15th December, 2000
  • Communicative Agents in Intelligent Virtual Environments , Workshop at the The Fourth International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents 2000), Barcelona, Spain from June 3-7, 2000.
  • For German speaking researchers: Second Workshop SOAVE 2000, Selbstorganisation von adaptivem Verhalten, 4-6 October 2000, Ilmenau, Germany, deadline for submissions: 2nd May 2000.

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Some of my academic activities in 1999:

• In June/July 1999 I worked as a Visiting Researcher at the MIT AI-LAB. In Boston I worked together with Cynthia Breazeal and Brian Scassellati on imitation with humanoid robots, associated to the exciting project KISMET. My stay was funded by an oversea travel grant by EPSRC.
• This year the book Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology will appear which I edited (published by John Benjamins Publishing Company). Please look at its Webpage for content and ordering information.
• Co-editing Imitation in Natural and Artificial Systems, special journal issue of Cybernetics and Systems. Co-editor: Chrystopher Nehaniv, Taylor & Francis
• The Special Issue "Imitation in Natural and Artificial Systems" has appeared, Cybernetics and Systems, volume 32, number 1-2. List of contents. Guest Editors: Chrystopher Nehaniv and Kerstin Dautenhahn, Taylor & Francis.
• Co-organising the AISB Symposium Imitation in Animals and Artifacts. Co- organiser is Chrystopher Nehaniv. Calls for Extended Abstracts by 14th October 1998, submission Deadline 21st December 1998.
• Member of the organizing committee of the AAAI Fall Symposium Narrative Intelligence. Co-chairs are Phoebe Sengers (phoebe@zkm.de) and Michael Mateas (michaelm@cs.cmu.edu). Other members of the organizing committee are Clark Elliott, James Lester, Chrystopher Nehaniv.
• Co-organising a workshop at GECCO-99 on Sensor Evolution in Nature, Hardware and Simulation, together with Daniel Polani and Thomas Uthmann. Deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st of March 1999.
• Franco di Primio and I are co- organising a workshop Embodied Mind / Artificial Life (German speaking meeting) at 4. Fachtagung der Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft, 28. September - 1. Oktober 1999 in Bielefeld (KogWis99). Deadline for statement papers/abstracts: 28/2/1999.
• Co-organising a workshop at Autonomous Agents (Agents '99) Seattle, Washington, USA. Title of Workshop The use of natural language in embodied systems. Co-organisers are: Jan-Torsten Milde (contact: milde@coli.uni-bielefeld.de), Michael Beetz.
• Guest Editor of Special Issue Artificial Life, journal KI. Deadline for submissions: 31st July, 1999.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (Virtual Agents 99), One day workshop prior to and in Association with the UK VR SIG 99 Conference, 13th September 1999, The Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom. Deadline for Extended Abstracts: 11th June 1999.
  • GECCO-99: July 14-17, 1999 Orlando, Florida USA, 1999 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
  • The Third International Cognitive Technology Conference, CT'99 (Aug. 11-14, 1999, San Francisco)
  • KI-99, 23. Deutsche Jahrestagung für Künstliche Intelligenz (German Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence), 13.-15. September 1999 in Bonn, Germany
  • Towards Intelligent Mobile Robots TIMR UK 99, Conference on Applications of Mobile Robotics : Research to Real World Problems: Potential and Limitations. University of the West of England Bristol , 26 March 1999, submission deadline Friday, 5th February 1999.
  • EWLR 8: European Workshop on Learning Robots 1999, to be held at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, on September 18th 1999
  • Attitude, Personality and Emotions in user-adapted interaction, a workshop at UM99, 7-th International Conference on User Modeling, Banff, Canada, June 20-24, 1999. Contact: Fiorella de Rosis (fide@mbox1.flashnet.it). Deadline for submissions: 15th of March 1999
  • BIML Biologically Inspired Machine Learning, a workshop during ACAI-99, 5-16 July 1999, Crete, Greece. Workshop Organisers: John Demiris (johnde@dai.ed.ac.uk), Gert Westermann (gert@cogsci.ed.ac.uk). Deadline for submissions: 1 March 1999.
  • UKMAS'99, The 2nd Workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems, Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK, 6th - 7th December, 1999, Deadline for submission: 1st September, 1999.

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Some of my academic activities in 1998:

• Guest editing a special issue of Industrial Robot, an International Journal. Title of the special issue is "Robot languages/Robot networking".
• Guest editing Social Intelligence, a special issue of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Submission deadline: 2nd November 1998, co-editor: Bruce Edmonds
• Guest editing a Special Issue of of Applied Artificial Intelligence, an International Journal on "Socially Intelligent Agents", co-editor: Chisato Numaoka. The issue publishes a small selection of contributions to the AAAI Fall Symposium in 1997 with the same title.
• Guest editing a Special Issue of the international journal Adaptive Behavior. Title of the special issue is: Simulation Models of Social Agents. Submission deadline: 30th of April 1998.
• Guest editing a book within the series "Advances in Consciousness Research", John Benjamins Publishing Company, editors of the series: Maxim Stamenov and Gordon Globus. Booktitle: "Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology".
• Bruce Edmonds and I organised the workshop Socially Situated Intelligence . Submission deadline 14th of June 1998. It is a full-day workshop associated to: SAB'98: the Fifth International Conference of the Society for Adaptive Behavior, University of Zürich, 17 - 21 August 1998, Switzerland, SAB'98. See the Workshop Webpage for the on-line versions of the working notes contributions.
• Takashi Kido, Stephen W. Smoliar, Patricia O'Neill-Brown and I are co-organising a half-day workshop Issues in Cross Cultural Communication: Towards Culturally Situated Agents. November 22, 1998 in Singapore. The workshop is associated with the 5th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI'98) Singapore, November 22-27, 1998. Contact address: Takashi Kido: kido@nttmsc.com.my. Deadline for paper/abstract submission: 20 August 1998
• Organising together with Gillian Hayes (University of Edinburgh, Department of AI) the workshop Agents in interaction - acquiring competences through imitation . Submission deadline 15th of January 1998. It is a full-day workshop on May 9, 1998, associated to: Second International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents '98), Minneapolis/St. Paul, May 10-13, 1998. See the Workshop Program..
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • The 3rd German Workshop on Artificial Life 1998, GWAL'98, 17. /18. September 1998, Germany.
  • Computation for Metaphors, Analogy and Agents, an International Workshop 6-10 April 1998 - University of Aizu, Japan. Contact: Chrystopher Nehaniv (Chair), nehaniv@u-aizu.ac.jp.
  • AAAI 1998 Fall Symposium, Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition, to be held at the Omni Rosen Hotel in Orlando, Florida, October 23-25, 1998). Contact: Dolores Cañamero (Chair), lola@arti.vub.ac.be
  • Human Learning meets Machine Learning , one-day workshop to be held in conjunction with the 10th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'98), Chemnitz, Germany, April 24, 1998, organisers: Dolores Cañamero (lola@iiia.csic.es), Maarten Van Someren (maarten@swi.psy.uva.nl).
  • Intelligent Virtual Environments, Workshop at ECAL98, Brighton Centre, Brighton, UK on 23-28 August 1998, contact: Ruth Aylett (r.s.aylett@iti.salford.ac.uk).
  • European Workshop on Learning Robots 1998 (EWLR-7), Edinburgh, 20 July 1998, contact address: John Demiris (johnde@dai.ed.ac.uk, chair), Andreas Birk (co-chair)
  • Workshop of UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems (formerly `FoMAS'), Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, U.K., 14th-15th December, 1998. Contact: email M.Fisher@doc.mmu.ac.uk

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Some of my academic activities in 1997:

• I visited ETL (Electrotechnical Laboratory) in Tsukuba/Japan, 22-July to 1st of September 1997, Humanoid Interaction Laboratory, invited by Luc Berthouze. I worked on a project on robot-human interaction.
• Socially intelligent agents: Within the AAAI Fall Symposium Series a Symposium Socially Intelligent Agents, held in the Tang Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 8-10, 1997. The ideas was to bring together software and hardware (robot) agent researchers for discussing common topics in the domain of social expertise. My motivation to initiate such a symposium was the hypothesis that a social interface can be specified which applies to agents which are communicating and interacting with humans, independent on the technological realization.

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Activities from 1993-96: Imitation and the Huegellandschaft scenario

• During my stay at GMD in Germany I started ecological experiments on robot group behaviour in a hilly landscape, the so-called "Huegellandschaft". From March- December 1996, during my stay at the VUB-AI Lab in Brussels, I had a HCM/TMR research grant for a project on robot group behavior and the imitation of movements. The project's main objective is investigating the development of artificial social intelligence in groups of autonomous robots. While the theoretical background is rooted in the biological and social sciences the project covers as well the engineering domain, namely it aims at constructing robots in order to experimentally test theoretical considerations. Deeply inspired by results from natural sciences "imitation" will be studied as a basis for developing individual "social relationships" and learning movement patterns. The project aims at (1) the construction and control of imitating robots, and (2) the investigation of social group behavior in "individualized robot societies".
  Project Description.
  

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Teaching:

• Winter term 1996/97: Artificial Life lectures at University of Bielefeld (Germany)
• Summer Term 1997, Autumn and Lent Term 1998/99, 1999/2000: "Artificial Life"
• Autumn Term 1997, Autumn and Lent Term 1998/99, 1999/2000: "Animal Systems"
• Lent Term 1999, 2000: "Mobile Robotics"
• 2001/2002/2003: MSc course Artificial Life (part of our Department's modular MSc scheme)
• 2001/2002/2003: lecturing in final year Computer Science Course on AI Theory and Applications
• 2001/2002: lecturing in final year courses on Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence

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PHD projects I am involved in:

• Joe Saunders (University of Hertfordshire): Learning to imitate
• Dorothee Francois (University of Hertfordshire): Developmental robotics and autism (RobotCub and Aurora Project project)
• Mick Walters (Research Assistant University of Hertfordshire, Cogniron project): Design of socially interactive robots
• Assif Mirza (Research Assistant University of Hertfordshire, RobotCub project): Interaction histories for developing robots
• Mike Blow(Research Assistant University of Hertfordshire, RobotCub project): Interaction dynamics with an "infant" robot
• Megan Davis (University of Hertfordshire, staff member): Narrative and Autism, Aurora Project
• Wan Ching Ho - Steve (University of Hertfordshire): Empathic Virtual Environments
• Ben Robins (University of Hertfordshire): Robots and autistic children in the Aurora Project
• Sarah Woods (University of Hertfordshire, Cogniron project): The design space of robots
• Tom Quick (University College London): Embodiment and adaptive behavior

Finished PhD projects:

• Aude Billard (University of Edinburgh, Department of Artificial Intelligence): Experiments on Grounding Communication Through Imitation in Autonomous Robots. Aude is now Professor at the Autonomous Systems Lab at EPFL, Switzerland
• Alissandrakis (University of Hertfordshire): Imitation and Solving the Correspondence Problem for Dissimilar Embodiments - A Generic Framework. Aris is now continuing his research on robot imitation in the Adaptive Systems Research Group as Research Fellow in Robot Learning, within the European project Cogniron.
• Iain Werry (Reading): Development and Evaluation of a Mobile Robotic Platform as a Therapy Device for Children with Autism, part of the Aurora Project. Iain is now Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at University of Hertfordshire.

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Demonstrations of my robotic work:

• Machine Culture
  A demonstration at the KI-95 Jahrestagung, Sept95, Bielefeld, Germany
• Alife Related Robots
  A demonstration at the Alife V Conference, May96, Nara, Japan, see a description of the the following game. Here you can see photos of the demonstration in Nara (thanks to Takashi Gomi!).
• 7-14 Sept96, workshop in Cortona, Italy (Cortona Konferenz - Naturwissenschaft und die Ganzheit des Lebens, "Innen und Aussen" - "Inside/Outside")
  A demonstration of interaction (body language) games including robots and humans.
• ROBOTIX97 13-16 March 1997, Glasgow, UK.
  Robotix97 was the opening event to the National Science Engineering and Technology Week (SET 97) in conjunction with the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The core theme of ROBOTIX97 was "Intelligent Machines". I organized a robot building workshop. Claus Werner (student from University of Regensburg, Germany) helped me. Children (and their parents) could built and control small fischertechnik robots. I gave two talks on Robots and Humans (14th of March, 9.45-10.15am) and Robot Societies (16th of March, 10.30- 11.00am). It was a lot of fun! Here you find photos of the workshop.

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Media involvement:

During my postdoc time at GMD (1993-1996) I appeared several times on German national television, and articles describing my Artificial life and robotics work appeared e.g. in the national magazine “Focus”. Here is an interview (in German) with me in pointer, an online GMD magazine, on social robots and robot-human relationships.

More recently, I was involved in the following activities:

• 28^th June 2001: panelist of BBC Knowledge series "Knowledge Talks", theme "Artificial Intelligence"
• 31^st October 2001: report on the Aurora project in the science section of the German weekly magazine "Die Zeit"
• 20^th November 2001: TV coverage of the Aurora project (worldwide channel "Deutsche Welle")
• 17^th April 2002: BBC World Service, Discovery Robots 2- Robots that learn, interview with me and Chrystopher Nehaniv on imitation and social learning.
• February 2002: An article about the Aurora project appeared in the French magazine “La Recherche”
• Spring 2002: Article on Aurora project in EPSRC newsline, issue 21
• 16^th November 2002: New Scientist Article on Aurora project
• November 2002: Online article on Aurora project
• 20^th November 2002: Live radio interview on Aurora project on NewsTalk106FM (The Flip Side with Daire O'Brien)
• 10^th December 2002: article in Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Aurora project (“Die Mechanik des Nachaeffens”)
• 10^th August 2003: article in Frankfurter Allgemine Sonntagszeitung, 3rd August 2003, p 51, article on Aurora project (“Die etwas andere Therapie fuer etwas andere Kinder”)
• 10^th 4 August 2003: 21.30, 3SAT: Neues Spezial - Geniale Teams: Roboter auf dem Weg in die autistische Seele, documentary on Aurora project (“Die etwas andere Therapie fuer etwas andere Kinder”), see also the 3SAT Website
• 28/29 October 2004, the Cogniron peoplebots were presented at the Science Museum in London, performing a game for up to 40 children at a time, see Robots learn 'robotiquette' rules
• 13 April 2005, Robot Companions - Live Human-Robot Experiments as part of robotics demo sessions at AISB'05. As part of the AISB'05 convention the Hertfordshire Cogniron team setup live HRI experiments that AISB'05 participants can join in. We showed a mock-up living room setup where a robot approaches a subject, who is watching TV, along different trajectories. In a second experiment personal spatial zones were accessed and related to the robot's expressiveness. Participants had the opportunity to learn about the Wizard-of-Oz methodology and discuss the experimental setup and research questions with members of the Cogniron team. Other demonstrations of research in the Adaptive Systems Research Group were shown at the same event (13 April 2005, 5.45-7.45pm, University of Hertfordshire).

K.Dautenhahn AT herts.ac.uk