RESEARCH PROJECTS

Developmental robotics and artificial curiosity: Can a robot be curious? How can a robot learn new tricks by itself and continuously during its lifetime? What mechanisms explain open-ended cognitive development?

The origins of speech sounds: what is the origins of vowels and consonants?    How can a society of individuals develop and share a system of sounds? Why some vowels and consonants are so frequent in human languages and some other so rare? Why is speech combinatorial?

Acquisition and evolution of language: What are the mechanisms needed to learn language? How can a robot guess the meaning of a new word?  How can one draw the attention of a robot towards particular aspects of their environment? What are the interactions between acquisition mechanisms and language evolution?

Natural human-robot interaction: How can a human teach new words and new tricks to a robot using natural means? How can joint attention be realized? How can social interaction be regulated?  Can we train robot to do tricks the same way people train dogs or dolphins with clicker training?

The Playground Experiment is a particular setup showing how a developmental robot can have a self-organized developmental trajectories with sequences of behavioural and cognitive stages of increasing complexity.

The Maïdo and Gurby Experiment is a particular setup showing how autonomous creatures can coordinate socially to build a shared repertoire of syllables. Social coordination is achieved through the modulation of prosody in babbling sounds, which allows creatures to convey basic attitudes and emotions.

Emotional Speech Synthesis: Can a speech synthesizer convey emotion to human listeners?

Emotional Speech Recognition: Can a machine recognize human emotions by analyzing the intonation of their voices?