This paper proposes a research direction to study the development of `artificial social intelligence' of autonomous robots which should result in `individualized robot societies'. The approach is highly inspired by the `social intelligence hypothesis', derived from the investigation of primate societies, suggesting that primate intelligence originally evolved to solve social problems and was only later extended to problems outside the social domain. We suggest that it might be a general principle in the evolution of intelligence, applicable to both natural and artificial systems. Arguments are presented why the investigation of social intelligence for artifacts is not only an interesting research issue for the study of biological principles, but may be a necessary prerequisite for those scenarios in which autonomous robots are integrated into human societies, interacting and communicating both with humans and with each other. As a starting point to study experimentally the development ...

If we are to build human-like robots that can interact naturally with people, our robots must know not only about the properties of objects but also the properties of animate agents in the world. One of the fundamental social skills for humans is the attribution of beliefs, goals, and desires to other people. This set of skills has often been called a “theory of mind.” This paper presents the theories of Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995) on the development of theory of mind in human children and discusses the potential application of both of these theories to building robots with similar capabilities. Initial implementation details and basic skills (such as finding faces and eyes and distinguishing animate from inanimate stimuli) are introduced. I further speculate on the usefulness of a robotic implementation in evaluating and comparing these two models.

This paper discusses the phenomenological dimension of social understanding. The author’s general hypothesis is that complex forms of social unders standing that biological agents especially humans show are based on two s. mechanisms: 1 the bodily, experiential dynamics of emphatic resonance s. and 2 the biographic reconstruction of a communication situation. The latter requires the agent’s bodily experiences as the point of reference for the reconstruction process. This hypothesis is derived from discussions in philosophy, natural sciences, and cognitive science on the social embodiment of cognition and understanding. Evidence comes from studies on social cognition in primates, infants, and autistic people that are interpreted in terms of the ``mind-experiencing’ ’ hypothesis. The second part of the The writing of this paper was supported by an HCMr TMR research grant. Thanks to Erich Prem and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions, which helped me to improve a previous version of this paper. I am grateful to both the AI-Lab at GMD in Germany and the VUB AI-Lab in Belgium for giving me an environment for doing my research on social agents. The seesaw scenario was part of a student project s Claus Divossen, Susanne Jucknath, Michael Savels. in collaboration with the University of Bonn, Germany. I thank Sanjida O’Connell for discussions on empathy and theory of mind. Armin Deierling provided me with information about autism resources and discussed with me the question of how people with autism probably perceive the world.

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This chapter addresses embodied social interaction inlif6 like agents. Embodiment is discussedf rom both arti cial intelligence and psychology viewpoints. Di#erent degreesof embodiment in biological, virtual and robotic agents are discussed, given the example of a bottomup, behavior-oriented, dynamic control of virtual robots. A `dancing with strangers' experiment shows how the same principles can be applied to physical robot-human interaction. We then discuss the issue of sociality which di#ers in di#erent academic communities with respect to which roles are attributed to genes, memes, and the individual embodied agent.

In this paper socially intelligent agents (SIA) are understood as agents which do not only from an observer point of view behave socially but which are able to recognize and identify other agents and establish and maintain relationships to other agents. The process of building socially intelligent agents is influenced by what the human as the designer considers `social', and conversely agent tools which are behaving socially can influence human conceptions of sociality. A Cognitive Technology (CT) approach towards designing SIA affords as an opportunity to study the process of 1) how new forms of interactions and functionalities and use of technology can emerge at the human-tool interface, 2) how social agents can constrain their cognitive and social potential, and 3) how social agent technology and human (social) cognition can co-evolve and co-adapt and result in new forms of sociality. Agent-human interaction requires a cognitive fit between SIA technology and the human-in-the-loop a...

This paper discusses the concept of joint attention and the di#erent skills underlying its development. We argue that joint attention is much more than gaze following or simultaneous looking because it implies a shared intentional relation to the world. The current state-of-the-art in robotic and computational models of the di#erent prerequisites of joint attention is discussed in relation with a developmental timeline drawn from results in child studies.

This paper is meant as a basis for discussion towards a framework for cognitive architectures integrating remembering, rehearsal, language and empathy. It describes the programmatic background of our concrete work on intelligent autonomous agents. The goal is to motivate a common framework which should inspire research on `artificial cognition' for autonomous robots as well as investigations on cognition in humans or other animals. 1 Introduction Our professional background are biology and artificial intelligence and we are mainly interested in the construction of intelligent autonomous agents based on biological and psychological findings and models. This paper outlines our research framework which grew out of considerations on cognition for artifacts, although we are aware that the successful implementation of these ideas is still a future goal. Instead of reviewing intensively literature of cognitive science and escpecially of cognitive psychology we focus on some points which are ...

The paper addresses technology which aims at designing systems which are intelligent or show life-like behaviour. I view `intelligence' and `life' as concepts which are constructed and attributed by humans a) in a certain context by the process of interaction and understanding, or b) between humans in processes of agreement and the social construction of conventions. Cognitive Technology can be an opportunity to study the processes of how new forms of interactions can emerge at the human-tool interface. These new kinds of interaction need not mimic `natural' ones, they can be qualitatively new forms of `interactive intelligence' which are more than the sum of their parts. The relevance of artificial life (AL) to the field of Cognitive Technology is discussed. The Embodied AL (EAL) direction is interpreted in terms of concepts which stress the individual, embodied and social nature of humans as designers and users of technology. `Believability', `stories', `autobiography', `social under...

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