Research directions

We study civilised agentic AI as a computer science problem - generative models, multi-agent systems, incentive mechanisms, trustworthy evaluation, and human-agent interaction.

Six computer science directions for civilised agentic AI

Each direction turns the lab's manifesto into concrete research on algorithms, systems, evaluation protocols, and computational institutions for agentic AI.

01

Image Generation and Visual Creative Agents

We study controllable image generation, visual editing, multimodal prompting, and creative agents that can plan, critique, and revise visual artifacts with users.

  • How can diffusion and multimodal models support controllable visual reasoning?
  • How should agents evaluate composition, style, identity, and cultural meaning?
02

Video Generation and Temporal World Models

We investigate video generation, temporal consistency, scene dynamics, and agent-controlled media systems for narrative, education, and simulation.

  • How can generative video models preserve identity, motion, and causal structure?
  • How can agents storyboard, generate, inspect, and repair video sequences?
03

Multi-Agent Systems and Agent Societies

We design and evaluate systems of multiple AI agents that coordinate, negotiate, delegate, compete, and form social or organizational structures.

  • How can agent societies coordinate under partial information and value conflict?
  • How should roles, memory, protocols, and communication channels be designed?
04

AI Marketplace and Mechanism Design

We study computational markets where humans, agents, models, tools, and data services interact through incentives, reputation, pricing, allocation, and governance rules.

  • What auction, matching, and pricing mechanisms work for agent-mediated services?
  • How can reputation and incentive design reduce manipulation and low-quality output?
05

Trustworthy Agent Evaluation and Safety

We develop benchmarks, auditing methods, reliability tests, provenance mechanisms, and safety protocols for agents that act across tools, users, and institutions.

  • How should we test calibration, refusal, robustness, and recovery from mistakes?
  • How can agent actions be logged, explained, audited, and attributed?
06

Cultural and Value-Aware Human-Agent Interaction

We build interfaces and computational models that help agents reason about cultural context, plural values, user intent, and human judgement in real workflows.

  • How can agents adapt to context without stereotyping or over-personalizing?
  • How should interfaces expose uncertainty, disagreement, and value tradeoffs?