Hot Topics in Intelligence Research

It is natural to think of vision as relatively primitive, compared to the richness of higher-level cognition. But recent work has revealed how perception is unexpectedly sophisticated along several related dimensions.  First, recent work suggests that visual processing spontaneously extracts not only simple features such as color, shape, and motion, but also properties more associated

Aiming to understand human psychology and what makes humans “unique” benefits from a frame of reference against which to assess it. Comparing human psychology with that of other animals, particularly our closest relatives, nonhuman primates, can provide such a frame of reference and thereby contribute to identifying the defining characteristics of the human species. Studying

Heiko Hamann is a roboticist with focus on collective systems. With his group he studies distributed robotics, machine learning for robotics, and bio-hybrid systems. In his collaboration with SCIoI member Pawel Romanczuk he investigates collective intelligence and especially the swarm robotics aspects of “Speed-accuracy tradeoffs in distributed collective decision making.” This talk will take place

Alan Winfield is Professor of Electronic Engineering and Director of the Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He conducts research in swarm robotics in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and is especially interested in robots as working models of life, evolution, intelligence, and culture. Alan is passionate about communicating science

Karoline Wiesner has been a Professor of Complexity Science at the Institute for Physics and Astronomy since 2021 and also serves as an external professor at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics at Uppsala University and spent her postdoctoral years at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the

Pawel Romanczuk holds a professorship on Complexity Research in Adaptive Systems at HU. For SCIoI, he works at the interface of applied mathematics, theoretical physics, and behavioral biology. He focuses on collective behavior of organismic systems. His research bridges analytical and synthetic sciences to study self-organization, evolutionary adaptations, and functional dynamical behavior. This talk will

Many applications in robotics would benefit from robots being able to learn manipulation skills from only few demonstrations or trials. This contrasts with the ongoing trend in machine learning of constantly increasing the amount of data required to learn tasks. The main challenge of acquiring manipulation skills from limited training data is to find inductive

Mohsen is a doctoral researcher at SCIoI, working on Project 27, Speed-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Collective Estimation. His research explores the role of networks in shaping collective opinion dynamics. In this lecture, he will provide an overview of network science with a focus on its applications in collective robotics. He will cover basic topics in graph

Justin Werfel is a senior research scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where he works on topics in complex and emergent systems, including swarm robotics, termite behavior, engineered molecular nanosystems, and evolutionary theory. He leads the Designing Emergence Laboratory, and works closely with a number of other collaborating labs. This talk will take place as

The past few years have witnessed significant progress in the field of legged locomotion and manipulation. This is mainly due to the availability of high-performance hardware as well as development of algorithms that scale to high-dimensional, hybrid and under-actuated systems. In this talk, I will present my recent research efforts, mainly on the algorithmic side,

Mario di Bernardo is Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy and Visiting Professor of Nonlinear Systems and Control at the University of Bristol, U.K. He currently serves as Deputy pro-Vice Chancellor for Internationalization at the University of Naples and coordinates the research area and PhD program on Modeling and

Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research focuses on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT,