The HMI Lab consists of a team of computer scientists, philosophers, social scientists, and industry practitioners, investigating the relationship between humans, cognition, AI technologies, and the associated ethical problems related to their usage in society.

In the cognitive sciences, there is a shift toward a view of cognition as a property of systems that are larger than isolated individuals (distributed cognition). According to this view, collaborating people and their artifacts can engage in richly scaffolded, environmentally involving partnerships capable of enhancing their cognitive profiles.

Members of the HMI Lab are united in the belief that distributed cognition represents a rich and fertile framework for designing, producing, and evaluating new models of human cognition, especially but not uniquely in collaborative environments, and within the context of ever-increasing human-machine interaction. They are also committed to exploring how such a view of cognition can contribute to better understand the grand challenges that the development and implementation of AI technologies poses to humanity; hence ready to analyze the changes that AI may bring upon many aspects of our lives, including our values and -as a consequence- contribute to the design, production, and adoption of sociotechnical systems capable of ensuring a fair, inclusive, and ethically responsible usage of AI in society.