POETICON - The Poetics of Everyday Life: Grounding Resources and Mechanisms for Artificial Agents

POETICON is a research project in the Seventh framework programme, that explores the “poetics of everyday life”, i.e. the synthesis of sensorimotor representations and natural language in everyday human interaction. POETICON follows an empirical approach for discovering the “languages” of sensorimotor representations and the correspondences with natural language; guided by experiments in psychology and neuroscience, it employs new and established cognitive protocols for collecting face and body movement measurements, visual object information and associated linguistic descriptions from interacting human subjects. POETICON views a cognitive system as a set of different languages (the spoken, the motor, the vision language and so on) and provides a set of tools for parsing, generating and translating among them. Through inter-disciplinary research, it contributes to the exploration of what integration in human cognition is and how it can be reproduced by intelligent agents. This is an ambitious first step for revealing and conquering the “poetics of everyday life”.