Verena Hafner is Professor of Adaptive Systems at at the Department of Computer Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She holds a Master with distinction in Computer Science and AI from the University of Sussex, UK, and a PhD from the Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Before moving to Berlin, she worked as an associate researcher in the Developmental Robotics Group at Sony Computer Science Labs in Paris, France. She is part of the Programme Committee of the DFG Priority Programme The Active Self (SPP 2134), PI in the DFG Cluster of Excellence “Science of Intelligence”, and PI in the EU H2020 project ROMI on Robotics for Microfarms (2017-2021). Her research interests include sensorimotor interaction and learning, joint attention, internal models, and behaviour recognition.

Studying the prerequisites for an artificial self can give insights into processes of self-construction in humans, as well as into principles of learning and development in robotics, and allow for a more intuitive human-robot interaction. In this talk, I will discuss the prerequisites for developing an artificial minimal self, namely a sense of agency and a sense of body ownership. This will be demonstrated with computational models of sensorimotor prediction and robotics experiments. In particular, internal simulations that predict the consequences of own and others’ actions might play an important role in the development of a sense of agency and self-other distinction.

relevant publications:
Schillaci, G., Hafner, V.V., Lara, B. (2016), Exploration behaviours, body representations and simulation processes for the development of cognition in artificial agents, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, section Humanoid Robotics, 3:39. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2016.00039
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2016.00039

Acevedo Valle, J.M., Hafner, V.V., and Angulo, C. (2018). Social Reinforcement in Artificial Prelinguistic Development: A Study Using Intrinsically Motivated Exploration Architectures, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, DOI: 10.1109/TCDS.2018.2883249Lang, C., Schillaci, G. and Hafner, V.V. (2018), A Deep Convolutional Neural Network Model for Sense of Agency and Object Permanence in Robots, Proceedings of the 8th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob), pp. 260-265.

Pico, A., Schillaci, G. and Hafner, V.V. (2018), Predictive Models for Robot Ego-Noise Learning and Imitation, Proceedings of the 8th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob), pp. 266-271.

Blum, C., Winfield, A.F.T. and Hafner, V.V. (2018). Simulation-based internal models for safer robots. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 4(74):1-17

Winfield, A.F.T. and Hafner, V.V. (2018). Anticipation in robotics. In R. Poli (editor), Handbook of Anticipation: Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Use of Future in Decision Making, pp. 1-30. Springer International Publishing.