The project TRAINCREASE – From Social Interaction to Abstract Concepts and Words: Towards Human-Driven Technology Development facilitates collaboration amongst the partners of the project via “microtwinnings”. A microtwinning involves the collaboration of Early Stage Researchers on short projects related to the research area, supervised by the staff at the 4 institutions. The “twin” or “triplet” or “quadruplet” ESRs teams will represent diverse skills.

This new call focuses on Methods and interdisciplinary methods integration for studying abstract concepts and abstraction. Emphasis will be given on connecting theoretical and empirical methods but also integrating diverse experimental techniques, such as experimental semiotics, experimental psycholinguistics, microanalyses of interactions and computational methods. The main challenges for the Methods-Oriented Microtwinning call, along which research lines should be organised, include: 

1. Developmental psychology and robotics methods and models of abstract word grounding 
2. A continuum of concrete-to-abstract concepts and their dependence on social interaction
3. Theory of mind modelling for trust in human-robot interaction
4. Abstract language for methods of explainable robotics and AI
5. Integrating first and second-person experience in research on abstraction
6. Embodiment of abstract concepts in real on-line interactions studied by microanalyses and movement analysis (e.g. trust, ownership, gender)
7. The relation between concrete vs abstract concepts and communicative function in prelinguistic interaction
8. Processes of abstraction in social interactive tasks and the role of group composition
9. Low and high numbers and effectors involvement
10. The use of agent-based modeling to study the interactive evolution of abstract concepts 

Find further information and apply on the Traincrease call for application site.

Questions can be directed to local AU contacts Karsten Olsen and Kristian Tylén. 

Application Deadline: 15.06.2022