Verena Hafner is Professor of Adaptive Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Head of the Adaptive Systems Group at the Department of Computer Science. 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 has published more than 80 papers in renowned scientific journals, books and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Her work has been cited more than 1700 times. She is part of the Programme Committee of the DFG Priority Programme The Active Self (SPP 2134), PI in the graduate school on sensory computation in neural systems (DFG, 2010-2019), and PI in the EU FP7 project EARS on Embodied Audition for RobotS (2014-2017). She has been reviewer for the EU, BMBF, DFG, AvH, journals and conferences. Her research interests include sensorimotor interaction and learning, joint attention, internal models, and behaviour recognition.

We are interested in studying the prerequisites for developing a minimal self in artificial systems through exploration and interaction processes. This can give insights into processes of self-construction in humans, principles of learning and self-organisation in robotics, and also allow for a more intuitive human-robot interaction. 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 in self-other distinction. In this talk, I will give an overview on the current research in Developmental Robotics on the self.

Schillaci, G., Hafner, V.V., Lara, B. (2016), Exploration behaviours, body representations and simulations 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

Schillaci, G., Ritter, C.-N., Hafner, V.V., Lara, B. (2016), Body Representations for Robot Ego-Noise Modelling and Prediction. Towards the Development of a Sense of Agency in Artificial Agents, International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALife XV), pp. 390-397, Mexico, July 2016