Socially Interactive Agents

The Socially Interactive Agents Group (Chair for Computer Science V) is an interdisciplinary research entity situated at the convergence of computer science and the social sciences.

Our reseach is centered around Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs) with either a virtual or physical embodiment. SIAs are envisioned to support humans in their everyday lives in the foreseeable future. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing, implementing, and evaluating the multimodal behaviors of SIAs to support humans in social domains such as education, living support, or entertainment. >

To achieve this, we integrate theories and methods from social psychology with various platforms including virtual environments and agents, social robotics, virtual and augmented reality, and mobile applications.

The Chair is affiliated with the Institute of Computer Science within the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. Due to the chair's interdisciplinary nature and involvement in teaching in the courses of studies media communication and psychology of digital media, the SIA chair is also an integral part of the Human-Computer-Media Institute.

Birgit Lugrin actively contributes to the SIA research community and has co-edited the ACM Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents, providing a comprehensive overview of the dynamic and interdisciplinary fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents and Social Robotics.