Research - Overview

Research at the Chair of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Hagen is focused on the investigation and development of interactive and intelligent systems.

Cooperating with researchers around the world, we are active in basic as well as applied research. Our underlying motivation on the part of basic research is the big questions of the nature of consciousness. Here we are interested in the investigation of intelligent biological systems by means of theory building as well as simulations on computers and robotical systems. More concrete, we aim at gaining deeper insight into particular aspects of human or animal cognition, such as vision or spatial cognition. Our main goal on the part of applied research is the development of intelligent computer systems that interact with humans in an intuitive and multimodal way.

Our activities are located around the following core areas:

• Interactive Systems
• Computer Vision
• Image and Scene Synthesis
• Cognitive Systems
• Computational Neuroscience
• New Media Art

These areas are closely interrelated. Most of our projects address more than one of these topics at the same time. Furthermore, results from basic areas such as Computational Neuroscience often fertilize the development of future technologies such as self-learning, adaptive computer systems.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction is profoundly interdisciplinary with links to such diverse fields as the cognitive sciences and brain research as well as the visual arts, design theory, and aesthetics. Beyond the above mentioned core areas of our active research we are interested in the philosophy of mind and in questions of ethics in the context of future technologies.