This Research Area (RA) focuses on the study of cognitive and socio-cognitive models and technologies in robotics, artificial intelligence, semantic technologies, social simulation. The RA includes six areas:
A) Evolutionary and situated models of behavior and cognition; Computational models of goal-directed behaviors. Artificial Life Techniques. Embodied Cognition, Adaptive Behavior, Language and Action. Study of cognition in collective systems (swarm-like environments).
B) Theories and Models of socio-cognitive attitudes: trust, decision-making dynamics and processes of reasoning, social cognition and collaborative processes, cognitive anatomy of emotions.
C) Ontological foundations of cognitive and communicative processes, knowledge engineering, conceptual modeling and software engineering. Semantic technologies for the management of knowledge as a particular case of the semantic web and of the web of data.
D) Advanced techniques of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their use in different contexts, both industrial/productive and of greater diffusion and social relevance and which foresee the coexistence and collaboration between human agents and artificial/robotic agents, the sharing of spaces and task distribution.
E) Linguistic, Sociolinguistic and Cognitive specificities of the Speech, also as the central element of human face-to-face communication. Development of technological applications in the "automatic language processing" area: speech synthesis, automatic recognition, avatars and talking robots.
F) Agent Based Modeling (ABM) and Agent Based Social Simulation (ABSS): study of highly dynamic social phenomena through computational models that generate phenomena to be explained in a virtual environment.