"Human-AI Interaction": Future-oriented focus for Fraunhofer IOSB department

Karlsruhe / July 11, 2024

With the relaunch of the scientific department "Human-AI Interaction", the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB will focus explicitly on the interface between humans and technical systems based on artificial intelligence. With around 20 scientists under the leadership of Dr. Michael Voit, the department researches current trends and innovations in the field of human-machine interaction and AI assistants.

Last modified: July 11, 2024

Ever since the triumphant advance of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and generative image generation tools such as Midjourney, it has been clear that artificial intelligence is finding its way into more and more areas of our lives. It will revolutionize both the role of and our interaction with digital technology in the long term. The current prompt-centric interfaces to AI systems — which usually require detailed textual instructions in natural language as input — are only a small part of conceivable future interaction possibilities.

Harnessing expertise in AI, ML, LLMs and VLMs

In order to make the best possible use of its existing expertise in AI and machine learning, including large language models (LLMs), visual language models (VLMs) and generative AI, for this future field, Fraunhofer IOSB is deliberately focusing its activities on research into the interaction between humans and AI systems. To this end, the "Human-AI Interaction" department was newly established — one of currently seven scientific departments at the Fraunhofer IOSB site in Karlsruhe. Dr. Michael Voit, who was previously responsible for the "Perceptual User Interfaces" research group, has taken over as head of the department.

Customizable interfaces and trustworthy decisions

"Human-AI interaction is a term that is increasingly coming into focus in the professional world," says new department head Dr. Michael Voit. "It encompasses precisely the aspects that we cover in our research and development: the creation of AI models to support people in a wide range of tasks, as well as the question of user interfaces and how AI can adapt to people in a very personal and individual way. It is also important that people trust the decisions made by the AI — and these must be comprehensible. That's why one of our Research Units is focusing entirely on the topic of Explainable AI (XAI)."

Fields of application: Vehicle interior, production, situation display

On the application side, the researchers at Fraunhofer IOSB are focusing on three fields of application: Based on many years of work on activity recognition in vehicle interiors, one focus is on AI-supported assistance systems and adaptive user interfaces for the car of the future. A second area is production and industrial manufacturing. Here, AI offers the potential to support people with monotonous, laborious, or even unfamiliar new tasks in a tailored manner — for example, through robots that assist with assembly work or through fast-learning semi-automatic quality assurance systems. The third area of application is situation visualization for emergency services in civil security and military contexts. Here, digital technologies and AI open up completely new approaches to creating situational awareness, supporting staff work and operational planning, and enabling better decisions.

"We know these areas of application from many years of experience. Our strength concerning AI integration lies in the fact that we have also been working multimodally for a long time: Computer vision, i.e. image exploitation, for example, to analyze gestures, as well as spoken language are input modalities that we have been dealing with for a long time," emphasizes Voit. "This puts us in a position to fully exploit the benefits of AI-supported assistance systems. We look forward to discussing this with potential customers and interested parties!"

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Press release

"Human-AI Interaction": Future-oriented focus for Fraunhofer IOSB department

Harnessing expertise in AI, ML, LLMs and VLMs

Customizable interfaces and trustworthy decisions

Explainable AI (XAI)

Fields of application: Vehicle interior, production, situation display

Vehicle interior

Production

Security and defense

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Dr.-Ing. Michael Voit

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Dipl.-Phys. Ulrich Pontes