Peter Jaeckel

My research project is concerned with the believability of emotional expressive agents.

The ultimate goal is to create the illusion of ‘active listening’ and empathy by means of an emotionally expressive, embodied, humanoid robot head that has the ability of mirroring back the emotions conveyed by a narrator. Inspiration is drawn from established theories in psychotherapy and social psychology as well as recent advances in social robotics and machine vision.

My particular interest is in how, and to which extent one can achieve the illusion of psychological attending and understanding even though it lacks 'true' intelligence. Furthermore, based on statistical models and time series prediction algorithms, I aim to find new approaches towards enhancing human-likeness by generation of genuine, non-repetitive facial behaviour that conveys a certain underlying emotional state.