Research Rationale
By promoting research into systems that have cognitive functions normally associated with people or animals and which exhibit a high degree of robustness in coping with unpredictable situations, we seek to overcome limitations of today's computers, robots, and other man-made creations to handle simple everyday situations with common sense and to work without pre-programming in natural surroundings, while maintaining and possibly improving the quality of their services.
Unit Mission
We support research on the construction of artificial cognitive systems than can interpret information (images, text, speech, video footage) and other forms of sensor data, and act purposefully and autonomously towards achieving goals.
These systems should learn and develop through individual or social interaction with their environment. The work should provide an enabling technology that applies across domains such as natural language understanding, image recognition, automated reasoning and decision support, robotics and automation, sensing and process control, and complex real-world systems. The work should furthermore borrow insights from the bio-sciences, and yield innovative insights about perception, understanding, interaction, learning and knowledge representation.
Artificial Cognitive Systems are at the junction of the cognitive, ICT, and natural sciences.