About Us

The Group of AI for People and Society, also known as GAIPS Lab, conducts research on Artificial Intelligence over five main areas: Affective Computing, Games, Intelligent Virtual Agents, Social Robotics, and Simulation of Complex Systems. The goal and vision of GAIPS Lab is threefold:

(1) to create computational models to understand collective dynamics and decision-making in social and life sciences, as well as in multi-agents systems;

(2) to create intelligent agents that can be immersed in complex, dynamic, and social environments, and that are capable of perceiving and understanding others, including humans, to act accordingly; and

(3) to improve user interaction with believable machines in playful interactions, such as games for serious purposes.

To achieve those goals, researchers at GAIPS have been exploring different approaches within Artificial Intelligence, including Multiagent systems and Machine Learning. Moreover, we resort to a wide range of tools developed across disciplines, such as Game Theory, Social Psychology, Experimental Economics, Network Science, Stochastic Processes, and Evolutionary dynamics.

The lab holds several assets for research purposes, such as robots (Baxter, Pepper, EMYS, Nao, Vector, Sphero), VR devices (hololens), etc. It is also equipped with three specialized rooms: one for games development (Laboratório de Jogos), another for robot development, and a third one to run user studies (Sala de Demos). Finally, we have a cluster of computers for scientific computing and large-scale simulations.