Social, Cognitive and Affective AI (SCAAI)

An interdisciplinary research group of the Cognitive Assistants (COS) department of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

We believe that satisfying social interaction with technical devices should follow the principles of Human-Human interaction. Within that context, we focus on modeling human emotions, communication of emotions, behavioral patterns, as well as social norms and values.

Research Topics

Affective Computing; (Mental) Healthcare; (Home) Care Robotics; eHealth; Virtual Reality; Sign Language Translation.

News

• Project Skills4Kids started
  Project Skills4Kids (Modeling socially interactive avatar behavior to support the promotion of healthy emotion regulation strategies) started on 01.07.2025.
• Project CONFIDENCE started
  Project CONFIDENCE (Mobile interactive experiential therapy self-esteem training for treating bullying among children) started on 01.03.2025.
• MindBot Journal paper on Frontiers in Robotics and AI
  Our new journal paper with the title “Socially interactive industrial robots: a PAD model of flow for emotional co-regulation” investigates socially interactive robots for industrial assembly.By embodying a cobot with an avatar and employing real-time emotional modeling, we aim to cultivate Flow and mitigate negative experiences like boredom. Our findings suggest a path towards more… Read more: MindBot Journal paper on Frontiers in Robotics and AI
• We organise the ACM Multimediate Grand Challenge MultiMediate
  ACM Multimediate Grand Challenge MultiMediate — https://multimediate-challenge.org/ In collaboration with researchers at Augsburg University, Stuttgart University, and INRIA Sophia Antipolis, the SCAAI group is organising the fifth MultiMediate challenge, focussing on engagement estimation across cultures and interaction domains. Estimating the momentary level of engagement from multi-modal participant behaviour is an important prerequisite for assistive systems… Read more: We organise the ACM Multimediate Grand Challenge MultiMediate
• We organise the BLEMORE workshop @ ACII’25
  BLEMORE @ ACII’25 — https://blemore.github.io/workshop/ In collaboration with researchers from Uppsala University and Georgian Technical University, the SCAAI group is organising BLEMORE – the workshop and competition on multimodal blended emotion recognition. It will be held at the 13th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2025) in Canberra, Australia. BLEMORE aims to… Read more: We organise the BLEMORE workshop @ ACII’25