A new publication released by PNAS and authored by SCIoI PI Pawel Romanczuk (among others) explores how earliest multicellular organisms coordinate collective behavior – and SCIoI’s trip to Mexico last month has something to do with that. Coordination between individuals is a fundamental challenge in collectives, and this is just as true for a country’s government as

Switch on the TV on 12 March! The next episode of the famous German popular science show, Terra-X, will be featuring SCIoI members Jens Krause, Marcel Brass, Heiko Hamann, and David Bierbach.  The documentary will explore the secrets and wonders of collective intelligence, with examples drawing from SCIoI research. And if you can't wait that long, worry

We've asked our IT Officers, Stephan Rosenzweig and Serkan Korkmaz, about their daily life at SCIoI, and here is what they answered. The two of you are behind the IT infrastructure at SCIoI. What does that mean? What does your typical day look like? Stephan: Our primary responsibility is to oversee and maintain the IT infrastructure. This includes providing

What do the brain and a school of fish have in common? They are both capable of efficient collective information processing, although each unit within them only has access to local information. In the brain, it is the stimuli from 86 billion neurons that form the basis for information processing; in the shoal, it is the

Event cameras mimic the human eye to allow robots to navigate their environment. Science of Intelligence PI Guillermo Gallego, together with Shintaro Shiba and Yoshimitsu Aoki from Keio University in Japan, recently found a new approach to help minimize the related computational costs.  The new method used event camera data, just like the previous method, but also

We are thrilled to announce that the Humboldt University of Berlin recently appointed Science of Intelligence PI Pawel Romanczuk professor of Complexity Research in Adaptive Systems, starting on 1 January 2023. The professorship is a great acknowledgement of Pawel’s outstanding achievements in research and teaching in the field of collective intelligence. At SCIoI, Pawel’s research bridges analytical

Mathis Kaiser had a talk with Solveig Steinhardt Mathis, what does it mean to be a lab manager at SCIoI?  As lab managers, we facilitate researchers' access to the equipment and services they need to successfully carry out their experiments. We coordinate and manage lab usage, purchase and document equipment, and support researchers by developing and implementing technical

Many studies describe the collective behavior in sheep flocks or schooling fish as a self-organized process where individuals continuously adapt their direction and speed to follow the motion and collective decisions of the group – as if the only leading force were the "collective brain" itself. This view, however, does not take into account that animals do

Imitation is a vital skill that humans leverage in various situations. Humans achieve imitation by observing others with apparent ease. Yet, in reality, it is computationally expensive to model on artificial agents (e.g., social robots) to acquire new skills by imitating an expert agent. Although learning through imitation has been extensively addressed in the robotic literature, most