Maria leads a Junior Research Group on "Embodied Spoken Interaction". The focus of her group is on understanding and modeling the dynamics of language and other (non-verbal) referential cues such as gaze that are typically available during face-to-face interaction. In particular, she studies how humans use (each other's or an artificial agent's) eye-movements in order to ground references in a shared environment, to infer (referential) intentions, and to predict upcoming action. Ulrich is a post-doc in Department of Psychiatry at the University Hospital Cologne. He has a background in linguistics, psychology, and social neuroscience and studies the behavioral functions and neural correlates of gaze behavior in real-time social interactions using a combination of novel and innovative interactive eye-tracking and neuro-imaging methods. |