About us

ZLAIRE is the “Zhejiang University – University of Luxembourg Joint Laboratory on AIs, Robotics and Reasoning”, devoted to promote collaboration in scientific research, teaching, and outreach in AIs, Robotics and Reasoning between the two Universities as well as their collaborators.

The vision of ZLAIRE is a world in which humans and intelligent systems are working together in a harmonious way, achieving jointly what would be beyond the reach of human agents alone. 

The mission of ZLAIRE is to build, in contact with relevant stakeholders, an interdisciplinary team of researchers to help laying the theoretical and technological foundations of an emergent society of humans and artificial intelligent agents.

The general research goal of ZLAIRE is to investigate and shape human-AI interaction. This encompasses modeling and studying high-level cognitive tasks of intelligent agents, like reasoning, learning, inquiry, planning, decision-making, communication and argumentation, and their relation to lower-level tasks like perception, action, and basic language processing.

The major research directions of ZLAIRE are as follows:

  • Formal Cognition: Working on a general theory of intelligent systems in real-world environments, with a focus on formally modeling and integrating qualitative and quantitative accounts; investigating the possibilities and limitations of artificial vs human intelligence, exploring the theoretical foundations of the epistemology and ethics of intelligent beings.
  • Data, Knowledge, and Decisions: From data to reasoning and decision-making: studying how to extract and represent knowledge from – big or small – data, how to reason on formalized (machine-readable) knowledge, and how to use reasoning for decision making.
  • Humans and Robots: Studying how artificial intelligent agents may perceive and understand humans’ requirements, how humans may perceive and understand the actions and decisions of artificial agents, how agents and humans may jointly perceive and understand the world, and how humans and agents may interact to achieve common goals.
  • Applications: logistics, social robotics, autonomous exploration systems, etc.