Thursday Morning Talk

Anne Jaap, Friedrich Schüßler, and Paul Mieske (Science of Intelligence): “Big mouse data: Characterizing mouse behavior through temporal statistics”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

The study of animal behavior is rapidly changing due to recent advances in long-term recording and automated analysis. Here we use these new developments to characterize mouse behavior via their temporal statistics. We analyzed positional data (RFID detections) of groups of mice housed in complex environments over many months. We found that behavior spanning seconds

Thursday Morning Talk

Raina Zakir (Université Libre De Bruxelles), “Robust Decision-Making in Minimalistic Robot Swarms Under Social Noise”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Abstract Minimalistic robot swarms hold great promise for applications in healthcare, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. A key challenge lies in enabling these robots to rapidly and reliably reach consensus using limited communication, computation, and memory. In this talk, we explore how robot swarms can collectively identify the best among multiple discrete options in their

Thursday Morning Talk

Matthias Nau (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “Revealing General Principles Underlying Active Vision and Memory”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Abstract: Cognitive neuroscience seeks theories that jointly explain behavioral, neural, and mental states. The dominant approach is to use specialized tasks designed to optimally probe a concept of interest (e.g., episodic memory), and to disentangle behavioral, sensory, and mnemonic factors through design (e.g., by constraining gaze during image recognition). I will present an alternative framework

Thursday Morning Talk

POSTPONED: Alican Mertan (University of Vermont), “Morphological Cognition: Evolving Robots Exhibiting Cognitive Behavior without Abstract Controllers”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature provides us with many different mechanisms for intelligent behavior, most of which we have yet to utilize. One such underinvestigated aspect of

Thursday Morning Talk

Simon Vock (Charité Universitätsmedizin), “Critical dynamics governs deep learning”

Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly through larger and deeper neural networks, yet fundamental questions remain about how to optimize network dynamics for performance and adaptability. This study shows that deep neural networks (DNNs), like biological brains, perform optimally when operating near a critical phase transition - poised between active and inactive dynamics. Drawing from physics

Thursday Morning Talk

Dimitri Coelho Mollo (Umeå University), “Functional Ontologies for AI systems: Tasks, Mechanisms, and Capacities”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Abstract The size and complexity of current Deep Artificial Neural Networks pose remarkable challenges to our attempts of explaining and understanding their workings. In this talk, I put forward a proposal for complementing existing efforts to that aim, inspired by research on cognitive ontology in philosophy of cognitive science. In particular, I suggest that, as