Research

Computational psychiatry

I am interested in modeling phenomenological properties of altered states of mind and mental disorders, mostly using system-level modelling and predictive coding. I am currently looking for collaborations in the areas of computational psychiatry and psychedelic research.

Developmental cognitive science

I am a co-designer of a cognitive architecture of BabyX - a hyperrealistic virtual simulation of a 2-year old baby that includes perception, attention, various types of memory, motivation system, emotion regulation, motor system and detailed models of selected physiological functions. BabyX can interact with humans via camera, microphone and shared virtual playground. BabyX serves as a tool for developmental psychologists studying early cooperative interactions between babies and their caregivers.

Selected publications

  • Henderson, A., Bednarski, F., Taumoepeau, M., Sagar, M., Knott, A., Takáč, M.: Completing the loop with BabyX: Harnessing a novel interactive experimental tool to uncover how infants’ communicative signals shape caregivers’ interactive responsiveness. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci (2026) 381 (1943): 20240373.
  • Sagar, M., Henderson, A., Takac, M., Morrison, S., Knott, A., Moser, A., Yeh, W.-T., Pages, N., Jawed, K.: Deconstructing and reconstructing turn-taking in caregiver-infant interactions: a platform for embodied models of early cooperation. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 53(1). 148-168. 2023. DOI: 10.1080/03036758.2022.2098781.
  • Sagar, M., Moser, A., Henderson, A., Morrison, S., Pages, N., Nejati, A., Yeh, W.-T., Conder, J., Knott, A., Jawed, K., Takac, M.: A platform for holistic embodied models of infant cognition, and its use in a model of event processing. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems 15(4). 1916–1927 . 2023.
  • Takac, M. and Knott, A. and Stokes, S.: What can Neighbourhood Density effects tell us about word learning? Insights from a connectionist model of vocabulary development. Journal of Child Language 44(2). 346-379. 2017.

Cognitive modeling

Besides control and synchronisation mechanisms in BabyX, my modeling research focuses on a variety of cognitive functions including event perception, episodic memory and sequence learning and planning.

Selected publications

  • Knott, A., Takac, M.: Roles for Event Representations in Sensorimotor Experience, Memory Formation, and Language Processing. Topics in Cognitive Science 13(1). 187-205. 2021. DOI: 10.1111/tops.12497.
  • Takac, M., Knott, A., Sagar, M.: SOM-based System for Sequence Chunking and Planning. In Farkaš, I., Masulli, P., Wermter, S. (eds.), Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. 672-684. 2020.
  • Takac, M., Knott, A., Sagar, M.: C-block: A system for learning motor plans with perceptual consequences. In 1st SMILES (Sensorimotor Interaction, Language and Embodiment of Symbols) workshop, ICDL 2020. 2.-3. Nov 2020.
  • Takáč, M., Knott. A.: A neural network model of episode representations in working memory. Cognitive Computation 7(5). 509-525. 2015.
  • Palkovics, M.A. and Takac, M.: Exploration of cognition - affect and Type 1 - Type 2 dichotomies in a computational model of decision making. Cognitive Systems Research 40, 144-160. 2016.

Artificial neural networks

I also do some fundamental research in self-organizing maps and Hopfield network based neural networks for content-addressed memory storage.

Selected publications

  • Fandl, M., Takáč, M.: Evaluating distributed storage mechanisms in a constructive model of associative memory. In Proceedings of ICANN 2025.
  • Fandl, M., Takáč, M.: Towards a Model of Associative Memory with Learned Distributed Representations. In Wand, M., Malinovská, K., Schmidhuber, J., Tetko, I.V. (eds.), Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2024. ICANN 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15016, Springer, Cham.. 226-241. 2024.

Computational social science

I am a local (FMFI UK) lead of the project MIMEDIS: The impact of media discourse on attitudes towards migration, migrants and migration policy in Slovakia. mostly working with modern NLP methods for semi-automated text analysis. I also use multi-agent modeling for researching societal phenomena such as evolution of moral norms, climate change beliefs spread, etc.

Selected publications

  • Blšták, M., Kopčan, J., Suppa, M., Havran, S., Findor, A., Takac, M., Simko, M.: When the Dictionary Strikes Back: A Case Study on Slovak Migration Location Term Extraction and NER via Rule-Based vs. LLM Methods. In Proceedings of Slavic NLP 2025 workshop, ACL Anthology. 2025.
  • Hamerlik, E., Šuppa, M., Blšták, M., Kubík, J., Takáč, M., Šimko, M., Findor, A.: ChatGPT as Your n-th Annotator: Experiments in Leveraging Large Language Models for Social Science Text Annotation in Slovak Language. In Klamm, Ch. et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences: Long and short papers, Association for Computational Linguistics, Vienna, Austria. 81-89. 2024.
  • Piskorska, K.M., Takáč, M.: Multi-agent modelling of climate change denial spread. In Farkaš, I., Takáč, M., Malinovská, K., Zigo, B. (eds.), Kognícia a umelý život - Cognition and Artificial Life - KUŽ / CAL 2025, Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave. 85-87. 2025.
  • Patrzyk, P. and Takac, M.: Cognitive adaptations to criminal justice lead to “paranoid” norm obedience. Adaptive Behavior 25(2). 83-95. 2017.
  • Patrzyk, P. and Takac, M.: Cooperation Via Intimidation: An Emergent System of Mutual Threats Can Maintain Social Order. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) 20(4). 2017. DOI: 10.18564/jasss.3336.

AI ethics

I am involved in public discourse, educational and regulatory activities regarding ethics and societal impact of intelligent technologies. Within Horizon Europe Twinning project Towards Excellent Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at a Slovak University (TERAIS) I served as a leader of Ethics work package. I am also a local (Bratislava) lead of the ENLIGHT Incubator grant Generative AI for Software Engineering (GenAI -SWE) focusing on development of a curriculum and materials for a course in AI-assisted software engineering.

Selected publications

  • Knott, A., Sagar, M., Takac, M.: The ethics of interaction with neurorobotic agents: a case study with BabyX. AI and Ethics 2(1). 115-128. 2022.
  • Takáč, M.: Asistívna umelá inteligencia a ľudské hodnoty autonómie, úsilia a rozmanitosti. In Farkaš, I., Takáč, M., Malinovská, K., Zigo, B. (eds.), Kognícia a umelý život - Cognition and Artificial Life - KUŽ / CAL 2025, Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave. 107-110. 2025.

Last modification: February 11, 2026.