“Digital Science Center”: University of Innsbruck: Social skills for robots
The research focus “Digital Science Center” (DiSC) of the University of Innsbruck, which was newly founded in 2019, is now quickly being fully expanded: In the interdisciplinary network, researchers convey all facets of digitization, drive innovative research forward and use synergies. For example, work is currently being done to teach robots social skills.
TYROL. Most people know straight away what they could do with a tennis ball in front of them, at least in theory: you can throw it, hold it in your hand and play with it, small children might bite into it. As early as the 1960s, the American psychologist James Gibson spoke of options for action as “affordances”: A tennis ball offers dogs different options for action than an ant or a human. These affordances have also been increasingly targeted by robotics in recent years.
At the Digital Science Center (DiSC) of the University of Innsbruck, a project called “ELSA” (Effective Learning of Social Affordances for Human-Robot Interaction) is currently underway that aims to teach robots to recognize these affordances, especially those that offer to people around them.
Univ.-Prof. Justus Piater, computer scientist and head of the DiSC, explains what makes the project special:
“The DiSC is made up of researchers from different disciplines. With Matthias Schurz, a psychologist is also involved in ELSA, who focuses on digital methods in his field at the DiSC. The computer science know-how in robotics comes from my working group and from colleagues in France.”
In particular, a robot should learn to be able to interact more purposefully with its environment, with people around it: “People also have different abilities, for example when they have certain tools with them. A robot can bit someone with scissors to cut through a piece of paper. The request doesn’t make any sense without scissors nearby, but a robot has to understand that,” explains Piater. In this way, the repertoire of actions of robots, especially in cooperation with humans, is significantly expanded. The results of this research will be implemented directly on robots. “ELSA” started at the beginning of the year and will run until the beginning of 2026.
interdisciplinarity
ELSA is just one example of the interdisciplinary research that the DiSC coordinates at the University of Innsbruck. A total of 16 people from all departments, from computer science to atmospheric sciences, law, philosophy, psychology and microbiology, work together on digitization issues – each in a dual role at the DiSC and the university institute. “Digitization is a cross-sectional matter, and there is a lot of potential in this cross-section, which we now want to leverage. Our mission is twofold: on the one hand, we strengthen the skills in digital methods in the individual faculties of the university, on the other hand, we bring interdisciplinary cooperation through networking,” says DiSC leader Justus Piater.
At the Institute of Psychology at the University of Innsbruck, for example, Roberto Viviani is running a project on personalized medicine with the participation of the DiSC: The goal is a platform with clinical research data to enable personalized treatment approaches for depression using artificial intelligence – the lawyer Clara Rauchegger from the DiSC and the The Institute for Theory and Future of Law examines in particular the aspects of data protection law.
students benefit
Students also benefit directly from the establishment of the DiSC: The “Digital Science” elective package, which is open to students of all disciplines, teaches the basics of programming, but also the current state of research on socially relevant issues of digitization, such as ethical aspects and legal issues in the digital space. “In the current winter semester alone, we have received around 500 booking requests for individual modules from this elective package,” says Justus Piater. This year, for the first time, the Digital Science Center also awarded the “Prize for Digitization Research” to theses by students at the University of Innsbruck.
With the full expansion of the Digital Science Center, director Justus Piater expects further personal impulses: “We have grown significantly recently and I hope that this momentum will continue: More and more students are writing their bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral theses at the DiSG, guest scientists and -scientists contribute further ideas and new cooperations develop. Through this complex and personal diversity, we are also freeing ourselves for the really big questions from the point of view of digitalization, which we want to tackle in the long term, such as sustainability and the digitalization of social life.”