April 1, 2024: Strand 1 Co-lead and Brandeis Professor Dr. James Pustejovsky Speaks at this week's Spring Colloquium Series
Dr. James Pustejovsky, Strand 1 co-lead and TJX Feldberg Professor, Department of Computer Science, Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, spoke at ²ÊÃñ±¦µä's Institute of Congitive Science's Spring Colloquium on Friday, April 5th. His talk, titled: Modeling Theory of Mind in Multimodal Dialogue, focused on Theory of Mind (ToM), which refers to the cognitive capacity that humans have to attribute mental states such as beliefs (true or false), desires, and intentions to oneself and others, thereby predicting and explaining behavior. Within the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this concept has recently become more relevant for computational agents, especially in the context of multimodal communication. As multimodal interactions involve not only speech, but gestures, haptics, eye movement, and other types of input, each modality introduces subtleties which can be misinterpreted without a deeper understanding of the agent’s mental state. In this talk, he argued that Simulation Theory of Mind (SToM), encoded as an evidence-based dynamic epistemic logic (EB-DEL), can help model these complexities.