This is the main Web page for the HUMANOBS project, a European research project funded through EU's 7th Framework.

The project's goal is to create an artificial intelligence that can learn socio-communicative skills by observing and imitating people interacting in a talk-show setting.

Most people spend countless hours using their communications skills – practicing them “on the job” so to speak, every day. Since training opportunities for such skills are in ample supply in modern society, they are a prime target for imitation learning. Robots that are intended to collaborate with people could benefit greatly from applying imitation for learning social skills. Since multimodal socio-communicative skills are a kind of meta-interface, that enables other kinds of learning to happen through interaction with (human or robot) teachers, this is even more motivation for endowing artificial agents with communication skills. For these reasons and many others, imitation learning of socio-communicative skills are an interesting research topic with significant potential benefits for future robotic and autonomous systems.

The project started in January 2009 and runs until year-end 2011.

Happy HUMANOBS!