Now 14 years since Luc Steels, current ICREA researcher and head of the Language Evolution Laboratory of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, conducted the experiment known as The Talking Heads . Developed between 1999 and 2001, it was the first large-scale experiment involving communication between people and agents (robots) with the aim of developing a shared vocabulary between all agents concerned.

Published in May 2015 by Language Science Press, Berlin, The Talking Heads sets out in detail the interaction between the agents, both in laboratories in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam and in public places in Antwerp, London and Cambridge, among others, and people who voluntarily participated connecting up on the Internet or interacting with agents in situ.  Luc Steels explains in the book the motivation behind the experiment, the cognitive mechanisms involved, the facilities, the experimental results and all interaction with humans during the experience.

One of the most significant contributions is that it presents the impact and subsequent development in the field of research in artificial language and intelligence after this novel experiment. Thus, the book has become a reference work for anyone interested in the history of language evolution models based on agents and the future of artificial intelligence.

Luc Steels is a pioneer in the use of agent-based models for exploring the origins and evolution of language. He is currently an ICREA research professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, a joint CSIC-UPF centre.

Steels is a linguist trained at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and a computer engineer specializing in artificial intelligence at the MIT (USA).  He was the founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Free University of Brussels (Belgium) in 1983 and of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris (France) in 1996. These two centres have been at the forefront of scientific research into language evolution in recent decades.

He has also written a vast number of papers on artificial intelligence published in journals with a high impact factor and books such as Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution, (2012, John Benjamins) ranging from natural language, the vision and the behaviour of robots to knowledge learning or representation, among others. Currently he is working on the origins of language, the dynamics of semiotics and semantic domains expressed by grammars.  Steels is the creator of a model of language evolution from a cultural perspective that mirrors itself on evolutionary biology as a method.