Hayley Hung wins ERC consolidator grant

Hayley Hung has been  awarded an ERC consolidator grant. The NEON project investigates how we can develop artificially intelligent systems to infer social intentions from non-verbal behaviour.

The project addresses intention detection in  open-ended contexts involving large unstructured social gatherings such as networking or mingling events. During these events, there are no prearranged conversations, multiple conversations can occur at the same time, and all conversation come about via coordination with multiple independent actors with their own possibly conflicting goals. How do we train machines to perceive plausible intentions in these complex, unstructured social environments?