On a daily basis we interact with friends and strangers. What can we learn about these interactions? Are the participants happy or angry? Are they being productive? How can we make an agent that interacts with humans in a natural way? How do we improve the quality of person-to-person interactions?

New! Learning influences among agents (07/20/2006).

Learning human behavior concerns with patterns of behavior of a single human under variety of circumstances. Imagine driving a car. Can we look at the driver and decide if he is about to change a lane?  

The environment that we live in often has a variety of cues and pieces of information that are somehow important but we just miss them. Can we build digital assistants that keep track of what we should be paying attention to? Can we build machines that infer contextual information from the surrounding environment and act appropriately, screening our cell phone calls if we are in the theatre, or alerting the parents of their kid wanders off?