The header of the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication

Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication

TiCC's goal is to design and develop creative and intelligent systems of which the functionality is directly applicable in the real world.


Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication


Program leaders

"Will we ever be able to interact with computers in a totally familiar and natural way? Could we communicate with them in exactly the same way as we do with other people? That is what Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC) research into creative and intelligent systems is working towards, under the slogan "Make the computer adapt to us, not the other way round."

As such, our work is exploring both intelligent systems and human intelligence. To find out how computers can communicate with us in a natural fashion, we need to know more about how we do that with each other. How do we use language? And what about non-verbal means of communication, such as hand gestures?

TiCC brings together a wide spectrum of academic research disciplines: computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), psychology, neurosciences, linguistics and sociology. In our work on AI, for example, we are trying to train computers to generate their own rules or algorithms from large quantities of data. A computer learns by measuring and checking, by recognizing patterns and by applying intelligent combinations and recombination. Amongst the resources being developed by TiCC with the help of machine learning are intelligent databases."

TiCC is one of the research centers for Tilburg University's School of Humanities. It offers a home to almost 100 researchers, 80 of whom are affiliated to Tilburg University, while 20 are external Ph.D. students or fellows.

Research lines

The Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication consists of two research programs.

  1. The Language, Communication and Cognition (LCC) research program, which explores cognitive, functional and social aspects of human communication through a multidisciplinary approach for a broad variety of domains

  2. The Creative Computing (CC) research program, which concerns itself with the computational modelling of cognitive processes in the visual, linguistic, and ludological (= the study of games and gaming, especially video games) domains.

Our mission and strategy

Our mission is to attract promising PhD researchers, to train them to become autonomous researchers, and to facilitate and coach them to reach a front-ranked research position. Our Strategy to accomplish this mission is fourfold: (1) enjoying doing research, (2) combining different competences to make new discoveries, (3) exchanging a variety of ideas in a pleasant environment, and (4) stimulating researchers to become the best in their domains.

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