Agnieszka Wykowska

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Artificial Intelligence and Human Insight. Prof. Agnieszka Wykowska on Robots as Intentional Agents

Jan 4, 2021

It's a Kind of Magic? Artificial Intelligence and Human Insight
AIIC UK & Ireland webinar. Presentation by Professor Agnieszka Wykowska, Head of the Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. 4 December 2020

Prof. Wykowska presents her work investigating when and under which conditions people treat robots as intentional beings. She reveals that some people are more willing to do so than others, and that it is possible to investigate their brain activity to understand why that is the case. She introduces us to iCub, a robot resembling a human, which (who?) has become something of a celebrity in Italy.

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska is Principal Investigator for the Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction (S4HRI) research line at the Italian Institute of Technology, Genova. She is also affiliated to Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, where she is an Adjunct Professor in Engineering Psychology, and to University of Manchester, where she holds a Visiting Professorship. She obtained a PhD in Psychology from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in 2008, but her background is in cognitive neuroscience (MSc in Neuro-Cognitive Psychology, LMU, 2006) and philosophy (MA in Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, 2001).

In 2016 she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant, “InStance” (Intentional Stance for Social Attunement). Her research focuses on social cognitive neuroscience and human-robot interaction. She uses behavioural measures (eyetracking, psychophysics) and EEG to research human-robot interaction.

She is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics and an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology (Cognition section). She is a Core Member of the Ellis Society (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems): https://ellis.eu, and a Board Member of the Association of ERC Grantees (AERG): https://aerg.eu. In 2018/19 she served as guest (co-)editor of a special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B entitled “From social brains to social robots: Applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction", and is in constant demand as a Program Committee member for conferences including the "International Conference on Social Robotics" and "Human-Robot Interaction".