Meet the recruited faculty – Tom Ziemke

How do people understand different types of AI and autonomous systems? This is one of the questions that Tom Ziemke is exploring. We spoke with him about human-robot interactions, children’s engagement with AI, and female role models in STEM.

Tom Ziemke, Professor of Cognitive Systems in the Human-Centered Systems division at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA), Linköping University, joined the ELLIIT Recruited Faculty in the summer of 2016. Nowadays, he is also one of the representatives in the ELLIIT Gender & Diversity Group.

What research area are you particularly interested in?

I am particularly interested in how people interpret different types of AI and autonomous systems, such as social robots, virtual agents, chatbots and automated vehicles. It turns out that, although they are ‘embodied’ in very different ways, people interpret many of these systems in surprisingly human-like ways, i.e., as agents with human-like perception, beliefs, goals, etc. This is similar to the way many people tend to anthropomorphize animals and interpret them as more human-like way than maybe they really are. 

Where did you find your interest in this specific research area?

My own educational background is in computer science and informatics, and I started working with AI and in particular neural nets a bit more than 30 years ago. My research has drifted from more applied research on neural nets for radar image interpretation to neural nets and robots as models of human cognition, and in the last 10-15 years human-robot interaction, with a focus on how people interpret – and misinterpret – robots, AI and related technologies. 

In your own words, please summarize your work within this research area.

I am interested in both the basic research questions, e.g., why do people interpret robots and AI the way they do, and the more applied research questions, e.g., how do we design robotic and AI-based technologies to be engaging and easy to interact with in human-like ways, but without creating unrealistic and overly human-like expectations. An example of the basic research perspective is my current Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council) project “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction”, where we are experimentally investigating the cognitive/psychological mechanisms underlying people’s interpretation of different types of robots. An example of the more applied perspective is our second Vetenskapsrådet project (with my design colleague Mattias Arvola as the PI), where we collaborate with education researchers and schools in Norrköping to explore how social robots might be used to stimulate reading interest in school kids (10-11 years).

Do you have any active projects within ELLIIT?

I had a Call A postdoc project on human-vehicle interaction earlier, but do not have any active projects within ELLIIT at this point. My postdoc Franziska Babel is partly funded by my ELLIIT faculty funding, though. She studies human interaction with both social robots and automated vehicles, in particular conflict resolution. We have also organized two interdisciplinary workshops bringing together researchers from human-robot and human-vehicle interaction, who have many overlapping research questions and interests.

There is a lot of exciting work happening with the ELLIIT Gender & Diversity Group. Could you tell us something about that?

The Gender & Diversity Group consists of representatives from the four ELLIIT universities. We organize an online seminar series on issues related to diversity and gender equality – usally 2-3 seminars per term. The seminars this term, for example, deal with female role models in STEM and with fair data. We also organize the ELLIIT gender calls, usually twice per year, which provide funding for small projects related to gender equality and diversity in the technological research areas relevant to ELLIIT. Examples are funding for visiting researchers, workshops or outreach projects.

What are your ambitions with ELLIIT in the future?

My research is connected to several areas mentioned in the ELLIIT 2030 Technology Foresight, in particular “Autonomous vehicles and robots” and “Intelligent assistants and tools”, so I hope there will be more ELLIIT projects in those areas in the future. I also recently submitted a large national research cluster proposal with colleagues in Lund and a couple of other Swedish universities, on the topic of children’s interaction with AI and robots. I hope that that gets funded and could be connected to and extended with new ELLIIT projects.

Is there anything else you’re working on that you’d like to highlight?

I regularly give Zoom-based interdisciplinary PhD courses on AI-related topics, in which I try to bring together PhD students from different research areas and universities, e.g., a PhD course on “AI & robot ethics” last autumn, bringing together PhD students in AI, cognitive science, design, and crisis management from Linköping, Norrköping, Jönköping, Uppsala and Umeå. Participants from other ELLIIT universities would of course also be very welcome in future courses.

And finally, what do you enjoy doing in your free time outside of academia?

Wife, kid, cat and two houses keep me busy. We live in the countryside south of Linköping and enjoy roaming the oak landscape.