Events
Our monthly Grand Challenge sessions. Subscribe to the calendar for dates and reminders. The Zoom joining link is sent by email to the mailing list only (not on the public calendar).
Upcoming
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Analysing Multimodal Communication: Networks, Repertoires, and Communicative Complexity
Two network-based frameworks for treating multimodal and multicomponent signals as an integrated system: describing repertoire structure, meaning, and function, and quantifying communicative complexity across taxa.
Severine Hex, Louise Peckre
Past events
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Honest Signals, Costly Lies: Trust, Deception, and the Evolution of Communication
From spider dances to human language, communication systems face the same problem: why believe a signal when deception can pay? We explore how trust became a design feature of human language, how multimodality keeps signals honest across species, and what...
Sławomir Wacewicz, Severine Hex
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Perceptual flexibility in social theory of mind
Exploring the theory of mind of humans and machines. Large vision–language models appear to perceive images flexibly — “perceiving” multiple possible emotional states — and we look at what that flexibility means for social cognition and for recent reports of...
Bita Azari, Hamilton Morrin
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Real-Time Digital Avatars — A Comparative Analysis
What does it take to make a digital human talk back to you in real time? Invited guest Yuntian Chai walks through game-engine rigs (e.g. MetaHuman), AI video generation, and Gaussian splatting — with live demos and a comparison of...
Yuntian Chai
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15:00–16:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Annotating social interaction with ELAN: Lessons from the past and future directions
ELAN has been a cornerstone of research on language and communication for 25 years. This session looks at both traditional approaches to annotating audiovisual data with ELAN and emerging ways to combine it with speech-to-text, motion capture, and computer vision....
Ezgi Mamus, Sho Akamine
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15:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Wearable Facial Multimodal Sensing: Emteq Showcase
A showcase from Emteq Labs, who build a facial wearable that tracks behaviour through facial optomyography while capturing context via a scene camera — and what unobtrusive, multimodal sensing means for social-interaction research.
Charles Nduka, Hristijan Gjoreski
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Social Networks in the Age of Humans and AI
How social interaction shapes social structures — and how those structures are increasingly shaped by both humans and artificial agents. Two talks on partner selection with AI, and on strategic gossip across social networks.
Yaomin Jiang, Alice Xia
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — The Future of MOSAIC
The last event of the academic year: getting to know the MOSAIC community better, reviewing the themes and formats discussed so far, and planning the best way forward for 2025–2026.
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Virtual Reality for the Study of Social Interactions and Cognition
Virtual reality as a transformative tool for social interaction research — enabling highly controlled yet ecologically realistic simulation of complex worlds — with applications to bilingual communication and to modelling human social perception and action.
Jonas Nölle, Alex Titus, Chen Zhou
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Open-Source Models for the Multimodal Study of Social Interactions
Free, open-source AI models now let researchers automatically extract a rich array of social signals from video recordings. This session presents several such models, how to use them, and research on their inherent biases.
Pablo Arias-Sarah, Rudradeep Guha, Hilal Nizamoğlu
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Human Brains During Social Interactions
A transatlantic session on hyperscanning — simultaneously measuring the brain activity of multiple people during social interaction — with the theories, methods, and applications this field has opened up.
Antonia Hamilton, Guillaume Dumas
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — How to Build a Motion Capture Lab: Overview, Practical Advice, and Challenges
Practical insights on building a motion-capture lab — from a high-end Vicon facility at the MPI to an open-source, low-cost, portable multimodal lab — whether you're curious about mocap or setting one up.
Sachit Misra, Wim Pouw
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Typology of the Visual Language(s) of Comics as a Window into a Multimodal Language Faculty
The Visual Language Lab (Tilburg) on the multimodal nature of language, drawing insights from the visual languages used in comics and their relationship to the structures of spoken languages, using the annotated TINTIN Corpus.
Neil Cohn, Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, Ana Krajinović
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Foundations of Multimodal Interactions
Paul Liang (MIT Media Lab) on the machine-learning principles of multisensory intelligence — a theoretical framework for how modalities interact to give rise to new information for a task.
Paul Liang
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Understanding Alignment in Multimodal Interaction: A Paper and Podium Discussion
A discussion of alignment in multimodal interaction, using Rasenberg, Özyürek & Dingemanse's (2020) integrative framework as a starting point for a broader conversation about this recurring MOSAIC theme.
Marlou Rasenberg
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Communicative Efficiency from a Multimodal Perspective
New perspectives on communicative efficiency that add the visual modality to the picture, drawing insights from sign languages and multimodal (speech + gesture) communication. This event featured International Sign interpreting.
Anita Slonimska, Gabriella Vigliocco, Natalia Levshina
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Experimental Semiotics
Experimental semiotics as a framework for studying interaction and communication in controlled lab settings — how novel semiotic systems emerge in interactive games, and the temporal dynamics of communication.
Jonas Nölle, Rui Liu, Bruno Galantucci, Ivan Toni
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Conversational Facial Signals: A Paper Discussion
A discussion of Trujillo & Holler's (2024) paper on how conversational facial signals combine into compositional meanings that change the interpretation of speaker intentions — with both authors joining us.
James Trujillo, Judith Holler
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Collecting Social Interaction Experiments Online with DuckSoup
An update on DuckSoup, the free and open-source platform for running, collecting, and analysing real-time social interaction experiments online — with a live demo and a discussion of scaling social interaction research.
Pablo Arias Sarah
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — From Dyads to Triads to Quartets and Above: Promises and Challenges of Group Interaction Studies
Opening up the study of interactions between more than two people — the promises of moving beyond dyads, and the unique challenges of triadic and group interaction studies, with examples from research on hearing impairment and acoustic noise.
Ingvi Örnolfsson, Raluca Nicoras
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — The Continuous Study and Dynamic Visualization of Gesture Ensembles: A Tutorial
A practical tutorial from Wim Pouw on studying gesture not categorically but as an ensemble of relational events — using bivariate time-series analyses to build kinematic spaces and gesture networks.
Wim Pouw
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Kick-Off Meeting — MOSAIC General Discussion
A general discussion to open the new academic year: members reintroduced themselves and shaped the agenda for 2023/2024 — which topics, speakers, papers, and methods to cover in upcoming sessions.
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Visual Signals as Core Components of Face-to-Face Conversation
Dr Judith Holler on how hand gestures and facial signals contribute to utterance formation and comprehension — arguing that visual signalling is core to human language and facilitates fast, coordinated interaction.
Judith Holler
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09:00–10:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Gesture, Voice & Face: What Do Different Modalities Afford for Communication?
What do manual gestures, vocalisations, and facial expressions each fundamentally contribute to human communication? Three talks on the unique roles of each modality in language creation and signalling, and their interplay. (Note the unusual morning slot.)
Jonas Nölle, Nicolas Fay, Marcus Perlman
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — High-Quality Listening: What It Is, and How Technology Can Advance It
Prof. Guy Itzchakov on the surprising power of listeners to shape conversation and affect speakers' emotions, attitudes, and behaviour — and the research prospects that technologies like avatars and chatbots open up.
Guy Itzchakov
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Multimodality as a Design Feature of Human Language
Prof. Aslı Özyürek on the universal visible components of language — sign, co-speech gesture, and facial expression — and how a multimodal view revisits our assumptions about language structure, processing, acquisition, and evolution.
Aslı Özyürek
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Holograms, Electronic Skin, and Meta Humans: Blue-Sky Technologies for Social Interaction Research
A look at emerging technologies — including a hologram with haptic feedback — that could transform how we present virtual avatars and study social interaction with full control over conversation partners.
Radu Chirila
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Dyadic Interactions in the Lab
How can we study interaction in the lab? This session focuses on linguistic coordination in goal-directed dialogue, with guests discussing models of coordination and the role of miscommunication and repair.
Kristian Tylén, Gregory Mills
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Grand Challenge — Modeling the Dynamics of Multimodal Communication
How can we find analytical approaches that integrate across communication channels and model their temporal interdependencies? A discussion grounded in two empirical studies of dyadic gaze coordination.
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Studying Social Interactions with Real-Time Voice and Face Transformations
Pablo Arias introduces DuckSoup, a videoconferencing platform that manipulates participants' facial and vocal signals in real time — giving researchers covert control of social signals during live interactions.
Pablo Arias
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — How Gaze Supports Face-to-Face Interaction
Restarting the MOSAIC meetings with a discussion built on Hessels' (2020) review of how gaze to faces supports face-to-face interaction, joined by the author and two expert guests.
Roy Hessels, Alan Kingstone, Daniel Richardson
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Promises and Pitfalls of AI for Social Interaction Research
A discussion and brainstorm on the opportunities and problems that modern AI tools and models bring to social-interaction research, with breakout rooms on AI as models of brain & behaviour, AI as experimental tools, ethics, and data.
Christoph Daube
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — The Challenges of Studying Natural Language
A discussion and brainstorm about the practical, conceptual, and methodological challenges of capturing and analysing natural language in social-interaction research — and the solutions members of the group can share.
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — Virtual Reality as a Tool to Study Social Interactions
A methods discussion on using virtual reality to study social interaction — from state-of-the-art equipment and software to setting up your own VR experiment and avoiding common pitfalls.
Jonas Nölle
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14:00–15:30 BST (UK)
Grand Challenge — A Review of Theories and Methods in Face-to-Face Social Interaction
A discussion built around Hadley, Naylor & Hamilton's (2022) review of theories and methods in the science of face-to-face social interaction.
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14:00–15:30 GMT (UK)
Inaugural MOSAIC Meeting — Flash Talks
The very first MOSAIC meeting: six five-minute flash talks introducing the research of group members, followed by open discussion of common themes and questions.
Rachael Jack, Chaona Chen, Pablo Arias, Jonas Nölle, Guy Itzchakov, Lukas Snoek