The goal of the Embodied Social Interaction Group is to build the foundations for the next generation of embodied AI systems capable of integrating into human social life. To achieve this, we are building a team of researchers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, combining methods and approaches from multimodal AI, human-robot interaction, psychology, and related fields.

Our research topics include:

• Multimodal behaviour analysis and generation: We develop approaches that are able to interpret and generate complex, multimodal behaviour in social context.
• Perception of robotic systems: We investigate how humans perceive robotic systems and how we can shape their perception to facilitate effective interaction.
• Fairness in embodied interaction: We aim to understand in what ways interaction with embodied AI systems can perpetuate societal biases and how we can devise effective countermeasures.
• Clinical applications: We are in particular interested in applications in psychiatry, as psychiatric symptoms are often expressed in- and treated via social interaction.

The Embodied Social Interaction Group is led by Dr. Philipp Müller. He received a Bachelor's degree in Psychology as well as Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Saarland University. After staying as a Visiting Student Researcher at Stanford University, he conducted his PhD research at the MPI for Informatics. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Stuttgart and has been a Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken until recently.