ISTC is involved in research, technology transfer and training activities in the following areas and applications:
- Artificial intelligence and techno-social systems: cognitive, social, autonomous and adaptive robotics, planning and scheduling, decentralized collective systems, decision making, knowledge engineering, semantic technologies, knowledge graphs, formal ontology, machine/deep learning, speech recognition and synthesis, automated natural language understanding, learning technologies
- Computational neuroscience: cognition in action: predictive and interactive cognition, interoception and related dysfunctions; computational embodied neuroscience, open-ended learning robots; simulation of brain functions at a neural and behavioral level,
- Social cognition: behaviors, motivations, emotions, agent-based social simulation, decision models and cooperation, goal-directed behavior, trust, limited rationality
- Cognitive, communicative and linguistic processes: acquisition, processing, dysfunction, multimodality, communication technologies, theory and analysis of speech and linguistic variability, dialects, prosody, action, gesture and sign languages, abstract concepts, sociability and sensorimotor influences, high level processes vs. physiological states
- Ethology, primatology, cognitive development, learning and socialization in children and non-human primates
- Neurosciences: electrophysiology for translational neurosciences, personalized neuromodulation, image analysis for neurodegenerative diseases, neurobiology of cognitive dysfunctions; phonological dysfunctions
- Quality of the environment, health and society: prevention, education, integration, disability
- Applications: space missions, cultural heritage, public administration data and processes, agriculture, medicine, aging support, treatment of cognitive dysfunctions, robot control, smart robots, conversational AI, virtual assistants, eScience, economics, law