**DIFAI ERC Advanced Grant Project**

![](imgs/LOGO_ERC-FLAG_EU_.png width="25%")  The *Designing Interaction Freedom via Active Inference (DIFAI)* project is an ERC Advanced Grant, led by [**Rod Murray-Smith**](https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~rod/) and starting in late 2023. *Problem:* Reliable design of interactive systems using advanced sensors and machine learning (ML) is an unsolved problem. New sensors could expand how we interact with computers, but are still hard to design for, without overly constraining user behaviour. AI algorithms can reduce human workload, but can fail in complex contexts and can control, deskill and dis-empower people. We have no principled workflows for designing interaction to allow users to flexibly share autonomy with supporting AI. *Objectives:* Integrate Active Inference theory into the human-computer interaction loop, linking human behaviour via sensors and ML/inference embeddings with dynamic mediating mechanisms to create end-to-end mutually adaptive loops between humans and systems. Develop novel interaction mechanisms for explicit and implicit control of AI autonomy levels to empower people via shared autonomy, while maintaining their agency. Create systematic, composable software tools for computational interaction design which support prototyping and analysis of ML-infused sensors coupled with humans, which can integrate probabilistic causal models to solve inverse problems with advanced sensors, adapting to closed-loop data. *Impact:* Using ML to give users freedom to express themselves individually, we can be robust to user heterogeneity, ensure fairness for diverse users and enable creative uses of technologies. Our tools will form the foundation of future usable interfaces with novel sensors and rich data spaces, and advances can be shared and rapidly built on, transforming HCI research workflows. Applications: 1. Whole hand touch interaction via soft, programmable # News * Project web page [difai-project.org](https://difai-project.org/) and twitter account [@ERCdifai](https://twitter.com/ERCDIFAI) launched (21st May 2023). # Vacancies * We will soon be advertising three Ph.D. studentships and one 4-year Post-Doctoral fellowship. # Team | | | |---|---| |[**Rod Murray-Smith**](https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~rod/) is a professor in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, where he is a member of the Inference, Dynamics and Interaction group and works in the areas of human-computer interaction, machine learning, and control.| ![Rod Murray-Smith](imgs/RodonBoat.jpg width="100px")| |[**John H. Williamson**](http://johnhw.com) is a Senior Lecturer in Computing Science. His research interests are around machine learning for novel sensing devices, probabilistic modelling and filtering for interaction, and the use Bayesian methods more generally in HCI. In the past he has worked on brain-computer interfaces, mobile interaction and real-time sonification.|![John H. Williamson](imgs/jhw.png width="100px")| |[**Sebastian Stein**](http://www.ssteinresearch.com/) is a Research Associate in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. His research interests are in intelligent interactive systems, spanning areas of HCI, ubiquitous computing, action recognition, computer vision and machine learning.| ![Sebastian Stein](imgs/sstein_2022_square.jpg width="100px")| |[**Andrew Ramsay**](https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/computing/staff/andrewramsay/) is a research associate in the Inference, Dynamics and Interaction group and his work typically fits the role of a "research software engineer", assisting other researchers with a wide range of software development tasks in a variety of research projects. | |