Two new projects granted to SPECS by the Spanish National Program: “Social interaction based on sensorimotor contingencies”

SPECS News   •   3 Feb 2017

The project, INSOCO “Social interaction based on sensorimotor contingencies”, led by a member of the Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems research group, Martí Sánchez Fibla with the participation of Clement Moulin-Frier will be sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness grant.

The main goal of the project is to model the social behaviour of individuals and then apply this model to robotics. The INSOCO project will be based on the theoretical approach developed by Paul Verschure with his groups SPECS : the cognitive architecture of DAC, Distributed Adaptive Control, an approach that explains both low-level reactive behaviours as well as higher level cognitive representations.

Thus, the INSOCO project will develop and model the necessary elements to generate social behaviour in agents or robots; self-regulation and basic sensorimotor learning; integrate this behaviour in the cognitive architecture DAC; prepare the technological components needed to build robot-robot and human-robot interaction scenarios; and, finally, design a casuistry and sufficient reference points to experimentally validate the initial hypothesis.

In addition to the above, the Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) research group, directed Paul Verschure, has obtained another grant to carry out the project: “Distributed Adaptive Control of consciousness in Humans and Machines”, over the next three years with a budget of 63,000 euros.

The resolution of the 2016 announcement of the Spanish National R&D&I Programme Targeting the Challenges of Society (Retos) and the Spanish National Programme for Fostering Excellence in Scientific and Technical Research (Excelencia), the Department of Information and Communications Technologies (DTIC) at UPF has obtained funding for ten projects.