A Language for Human Action

Human-centered computing (HCC) involves conforming computer technology to humans while naturally achieving human-machine interaction. In a human-centered system, the interaction focuses on human requirements, capabilities, and limitations. These anthropocentric systems also focus on the consideration of human sensory-motor skills in a wide range of activities. This ensures that the interface between artificial agents and human users accounts for perception and action in a novel interaction paradigm. In turn, this leads to behavior understanding through cognitive models that allow content description and, ultimately, the integration of real and virtual worlds. Our work focuses on building a language that maps to the lower-level sensory and motor languages and to the higher-level natural language. An empirically demonstrated human activity language provides sensory-motor-grounded representations for understanding human actions. A linguistic framework allows the analysis and synthesis of these actions.