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

• Health literacy – AI as a game changer?!
  Our research fellow Jan Alexandersson participated at the Federal Institute for Public Health and the Federal Ministry of Health on November 19, 2025, in Berlin. An interview extract here: https://www.bioeg-fachtag.de/gesundheitskompetenz/ Take over. “The findings from the current Bitkom study and the conference organized by the Federal Institute for Public Health (BIÖG) and the Federal Ministry… Read more: Health literacy – AI as a game changer?!
• SLTAT 2025 publications
  On last September 16th, 2025, the SCAAI group organized the 9th international workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technologies (SLTAT2025) and contributed with 6 publications! The SLTAT presentation itself:Nunnari, F. et al. (2025) “9th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology (SLTAT 2025),” in Adjunct Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual… Read more: SLTAT 2025 publications
• 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