Petra Wagner

Research Statement

Throughout my career, I felt privileged to work at the interface of speech technology, cognitive science and speech science. My research and teaching is driven by three strong convictions: First, any aspect of information exchange, be it between humans or between humans and machines, cannot be fully understood if separated from the interactive process and the physical and social world it is embedded in. Second, communicative interactions between agents are intrinsically multimodal in nature, making them more robust and contextually grounded. Third, we will ultimately need to model computationally whatever we aim to understand. With my research, I have added an understanding how my strictly interactive perspective is necessary for assessing communicative success, both between humans and between humans and machines.