The SCIoI Executive Board

The SCIoI Executive Board, elected by the cluster’s scientific staff, is responsible for all major decisions within the cluster and for developing the SCIoI research program. It also provides guidance to both the scientific staff and the coordination office on SCIoI’s objectives. The Board also decides on policies and funding applications, determines the admission of external PIs, advises on budgeting decisions, and oversees quality assurance within the cluster.
The Executive Board consists of the SCIoI spokesperson, four Principal Investigators, a Postdoctoral representative and a PhD representative.

Meet our Executive Board members:

Oliver Brock
(spokesperson)

Oliver Brock represents the synthetic discipline robotics. He has extensive experience in building real-world robotic systems, contributing also to related disciplines, including perception and machine learning. Within the fields of robotics, he is a leader in leveraging collaborations with analytical disciplines, in particular psychology and behavioral biology, to work towards an understanding of embodied intelligence.

Jörg Raisch
(deputy spokesperson)

Jörg Raisch represents the discipline control. His research interests include both methodological and applied aspects of control. In the context of SCIoI, his work on abstraction-based synthesis of discrete event and hybrid control systems, on consistent control hierarchies, and on consensus-based control of multiagent systems will be particularly relevant.

Christa Thöne-Reineke*

Christa Thöne-Reineke represents the analytical discipline of behavioral biology. She has extensive experience in laboratory animal science and animal models, especially in animal behavior as read out for severity assessment and animal welfare. She will study the costs and benefits of cognition and the influence of emotion and well-being on animal behavior.

*on interim basis until confirmed at the next election

Marcel Brass*

Marcel Brass is a cognitive and social neuroscientist who is interested in motor and cognitive control. He investigates the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social cognition, cognitive flexibility and human volition. He is best known for his behavioral and brain imaging research on imitation, task switching and intentional control of action. Within SCIoI, he will primarily investigate social intelligence.

*on interim basis until confirmed at the next election

Jens Krause

Jens Krause’s research will be part of the behavioral biology component of SCIoI. He and his group have developed an interactive robotic fish which is recognised by live fish as a conspecific. This robot is used to investigate basic principles of collective behavior and collective cognition. In particular they are interested in the way in which group-living organisms process information to deal with environmental challenges and how they come to collective decisions that are adaptive. Their interactive robot can embody the algorithms that they identified in biological agents and thereby allows them to test their validity. In order to give their robots realistic behaviour (as fish) they address the issues of dimensionality reduction and cursive interaction which are central to SCIoI.

Pia Bideau
(Postdoc representative)

Pia Bideau is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Berlin and part of the Cluster Science of Intelligence as of January 2020. Her research aims to address the topic of how one can teach a computer to see and understand the world as we humans do, the strengths and weaknesses of a computer vision system compared to a human vision system, and how the two systems can learn from each other. We move, we discover new interesting stuff that raises our curiosity if a perceived situation doesn’t match certain expectations, and we learn. Pia’s research focuses on motion – our motion as well as our motion perception. Motion is a key ability that we as living beings have to explore our environment. Our motion for example helps us to perceive depth, and the motion of objects helps us to recognize these objects even if those are unknown to us. Motion in the visual world helps us understanding an unstructured environment we are living in. Before she joined the Cluster of Intelligence, Pia received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (USA) working with Prof. Erik Learned-Miller and worked together with Cordelia Schmid and Karteek Alahari as part of an internship at Inria in Grenoble (France).

Jonas Frenkel
(PhD representative)

Jonas has a background in psychology and human factors. With a keen interest in the interplay between humans and machines, his research focuses on the field of human-robot interaction in general and social robotics in particular. Prior to joining SCIoI, he worked on developing robotic therapy scenarios for children with autism by using emotion-sensitive technology. At SCIoI, he is working on developing computational models of nonverbal social behaviors in order to improve our understanding of the underlying principles of social interactions and to eventually allow synthetic agents to perceive and appropriately react to social cue.