Research in the Cognition & Interaction Lab (COIN) is focused on embodied / situated / distributed cognition in natural and artificial cognitive systems - in particular:

• sensorimotor interaction between cognitive agents (humans, animals, robots) and their environments,
• social interaction between people, between robots, and not least between humans and robots, and
• human interaction with different types of information technology, in particular decision support systems and computer games.

In terms of methodologies used, most of our projects currently are in bio-inspired cognitive robotics and (neuro-) computational modeling, but we are also working with cognitive ethnography of human-machine and human-human interaction, motion capture and behavioral experiments with human subjects.

Projects

New European projects in the area of cognitive systems & robotics:

• NeuralDynamics ("A neuro-dynamic framework for cognitive robotics: Autonomous generation of scene representations and behavioral sequences using online learning"), 2011-2015 (details still under negotiation), coordinator: Prof Gregor Schöner, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Our lab's focus in this project is on the role of motivation in the organization of sequential behavior and goal-directed sequence generation.

• EUCogIII - the successor to the EUCogII network (cf below), late 2011 to late 2014 (details still under negotiation).

Current European cognitive systems & robotics projects that we are involved in:

• ROSSI, an FP7 STREP project on sensorimotor and social interaction (human-humanoid) and concept/language grounding, running March 2008 - February 2011. Our lab's focus in ROSSI is on neurocomputational / dynamic-field- theoretical models of the mirror neuron system as well as action segmentation.

• ROBOT-DOC, a Marie Curie Initial Training Network on developmental cognitive/humanoid robotics, September 2009 - September 2013. Our lab's focus in ROBOT-DOC is on affective / emotional / motivational mechanisms in (humanoid) cognitive / developmental robotics.
• EUCogII, an FP7 network project on cognitive systems, running February 2009 - January 2012.

Recently finished European projects:

• ICEA, an FP6 integrated project on biologically inspired robotics and brain-based cognitive architectures, coordinated by our lab, which ran January 2006 - December 2009.  The final review was in March 2010 and the project is considered "completed successful". Our lab's focus in ICEA was on cognitive-affective neurocomputational architectures.
• euCognition, January 2006 - December 2008, was the predecessor to EUCogII and EUCogIII (cf above).

Other current externally funded projects:

• We are one of six nodes in the Swedish Graduate School in Cognitive Science (SweCog) which is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) 2008 to 2013 (VR page in Swedish).
• In the university's Information Fusion research program we are involved in a couple of projects on decision support and situation awareness, funded by the Knowledge Foundation 2005 to 2011.
• PINGO is a (pre-) project on pedestrian gait recognition (news item in Swedish). Funded by the Knowledge Foundation. Contact person: Paul Hemeren. 

Staff

The COIN lab currently consists of the following people.

Full professor(s)

• Tom Ziemke

Assistant professors

• Paul Hemeren - ROSSI, PINGO
• Jessica Lindblom
• Rob Lowe – ICEA, ROBOT-DOC, NeuralDynamics
• Tarja Susi - InfoFusion, computer games

Postdocs

• Boris Duran – ROSSI, NeuralDynamics
• Serge Thill – ROSSI, NeuralDynamics

PhD students

• Hiran Ekanayake - affective computing & games
• Kiril Kiryazov - ROBOT-DOC
• Gauss Lee (Li Cai) - ROBOT-DOC
• Alberto Montebelli – ICEA (planning to defend his PhD thesis in early 2011)
• Maria Nilsson – InfoFusion (planning to defend her PhD thesis Jan 14)
• Jana Rambusch – computer games (planning to defend her PhD thesis Jan 28)
• Henrik Svensson

Robots

• One Nao humanoid, inventively called "Nao".
• A number of wheeled robots: some e-pucks, some old Kheperas, and a very, very old Nomad 200 called "Marvin".