The Cognitive Systems Research Institute (CSRI) is a non-governmental, nonprofit research organization that specializes in the highly interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Systems. Its core activities comprise theoretical, experimental and computational research and development for exploration and modeling of fundamental mechanisms in human cognition. The institute sprung out of the realization that ROBOTS NEED LANGUAGE, for communication, for multisensory cognition, for reaching human-level intelligence. Research and development towards this direction has the potential to revolutionize not only cognitive robotics, but also a number of other disciplines, including computational linguistics, computer vision and multimedia processing. CSRI has established a research track along this new direction with European-funded projects that span more than 8 years of focussed research and development along these lines (2008-2015). The projects include POETICON++ and its predecessor POETICON (http://www.poeticon.eu), both coordinated by the CSRI director, Dr Katerina Pastra. CSRI research and development is committed to providing open source software and open access data to the public.