The University of Potsdam (PECoG) reports on Dr. Katharina Kühne’s presentations at ICSR + Art 2026 in London: „At the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) in London, Dr. Katharina Kühne presented research on the perception of AI-generated art. The study was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Dominic Thompson (University of Nottingham) and Prof. Christoph Scheepers (University of Glasgow), sparking engaging discussions about creativity, perception, and the role of generative AI in society.“ (PECoG News) And further: „PECoG was also represented by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel (FHNW School of Business, Windisch, Switzerland), his brilliant student Sahan Hatemo, and Dr. Katharina Kühne, who presented their research on the recognition of authentic laughter by large language models (LLMs). The project explores the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in recognizing subtle social and emotional cues, contributing to our understanding of AI’s potential for social cognition.“ (PECoG News) Sahan Hatemo is the first author of the paper titled „Reading between the Laughs: A Human-Referenced Audio Evaluation of MLLMs for Social Robotics“. Oliver Bendel had served as the co-supervisor for Katharina Kühne’s doctoral dissertation and has been an associate researcher at PECoG since 2022. The article was published in July 2027 and can be accessed at www.uni-potsdam.de/en/pecog/news.

Fig.: Sahan Hatemo and Jana Figge at ICSR 2026