My main research motivation is to develop complete autonomous agents that interact with people socially. For an agent to be social with respect to humans, it needs to be able to parse and process the multitude of aspects that comprise the human cultural experience. That in itself gives rise to many fascinating learning problems. I am interested in tackling these fundamental problems from an empirical as well as a theoretical perspective. Music, as a general target domain, serves as an excellent testbed for these research ideas. Musical skills - playing music (alone or in a group), analyzing music or composing it - all involve extremely advanced knowledge representation and problem solving tools. Creating “musical agents” - agents that can interact richly with people in the music domain - is a challenge that holds the potential of advancing social agents research, and contributing important and broadly applicable AI knowledge. This belief is fueled not just by my background in comp...