Robots as school teachers: Meeting of scientists at Jacobs University Bremen

Prof. Dr. Arvid Kappas and doctoral student Rebecca Stower with the robot "Pepper" © Jacobs University ,

 

December 6, 2018

It is about the interaction of humans and robots in school education: Starting Monday, 15 international researchers from various disciplines will spend a week on the campus of Jacobs University discussing this topic. The workshop is part of the European Union-funded research program "ANIMATAS", which promotes intuitive human-machine interaction with human-like social skills for school education. Jacobs University is part of the research consortium.

ANIMATAS aims to promote innovative educational methods using state-of-the-art robotics and artificial intelligence. It pursues an interdisciplinary approach and combines engineering and computer sciences with psychology and pedagogy. Fundamental questions of human perception of interactions between robots and virtual characters are researched. New social learning mechanisms are to be developed as well as possibilities for personalized adaptation of robots to human users.

, Prof. Dr. Arvid Kappas and doctoral student Rebecca Stower with the robot "Pepper" © Jacobs University

Jacobs University is the only German university represented in the consortium. Scientific partners include the University of Uppsala and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology/ Stockholm from Sweden, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) from Switzerland, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores - Investigação e Desenvolvimento (INESC-ID) from Portugal, as well as the Institut Mines Télécom Paris Tech (IMT) and Sorbonne University from France, which coordinates the project. Also involved is Softbank Robotics, the company that developed the well-known Nao and Pepper robots.

The project started this year and will run for four years. It is part of the Marie Curie European Training Network (ETN), an EU-funded doctoral training program. It is considered innovative, as is the subject of the research, because it includes, for example, non-academic partners who could be future employers of doctoral candidates in the training process.

 

Scientific contact:
Prof. Dr. Arvid Kappas | Professor für Psychologie
a.kappas [at] jacobs-university.de | Tel.: +49 421 200-4348