From Human Simulations to Work Companions: AI Agents and the Future of Human-AI Collaborative Intelligence

Description

Talk

AI agents are rapidly evolving, from the early efforts to simulate human cognition and social behavior, to sophisticated multi-agent systems that can act as practical collaborators in everyday work. Building on nearly 75 years of AI and NLP research, today’s AI agents can plan, reason, communicate, and even coordinate. This talk explores the growing capabilities of AI agents as both mirrors and extensions of human cognition and behavior. I will discuss advances in multi-agent frameworks that simulate social reasoning, cooperation, and emergent communication, and explore how these capabilities are being translated into workplace applications supporting brainstorming, narrative development, and research design.

Instructors Bio

Rada Mihalcea, PhD

Professor | Co-foundeк at University of Michigan | Initium AI

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She was a program co-chair for EMNLP 2009 and ACL 2011, and a general chair for NAACL 2015 and *SEM 2019. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and a former President of the ACL. She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2013), and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).