Grounding Embodied Multimodal Interaction : Towards Behaviourally Established Semantic Foundations for Human-Centered AI

Kurzfassung

We position recent and emerging research in cognitive vision and perception addressing three key questions: (1) What kind of relational abstraction mechanisms are needed to perform (explainable) grounded inference -- e.g., question-answering, qualitative generalisation, hypothetical reasoning-- relevant to embodied multimodal interaction? (2) How can such abstraction mechanisms be founded on behaviourally established cognitive human-factors emanating from naturalistic empirical observation? and (3) How to articulate behaviourally established abstraction mechanisms as formal declarative models suited for grounded knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) as part of large-scale hybrid AI and computational cognitive systems. We contextualise (1--3) in the backdrop of recent results at the interface of AI/KR, and Spatial Cognition and Computation. Our main purpose is to emphasise the importance of behavioural research based foundations for next-generation, human-centred AI, e.g., as relevant to applications in Autonomous Vehicles, Social and Industrial Robots, and Visuo-Auditory Media.